Cheater's Sourdough Bread

All of my fermenting vegetables got me thinking...

I love sourdough bread, but I've been hesitant to start up a sourdough starter, without a fridge or freezer to slow the fermenting starter, I'd have to feed it regularly, which would mean either throwing starter out (since we are sans-chickens lately) or baking like a fiend.  And knowing myself, I'd probably work myself into a frenzy using up all of that extra starter in various rolls, breads, pancakes, etc, when we really don't eat all that much wheat normally.

Maybe I've just been lazy, who knows.

Anyway, I got to thinking over my maturing sauerkraut, how the lactobacilli  in the fermenting vegetables would be the same lactobacilli in the sourdough starter.  Then remembering Sally Fallon's Nourishing Traditions technique of increasing grain's digestibility and nutrition by soaking the flour overnight in water with a few tablespoons of whey (lactobacilli again), I knew I couldn't go too far wrong with this.

So I ground a pound (my normal loaf size) of our homegrown wheat kernels, placed the whole wheat flour in a bowl (about 4 cups) with 1 1/2 to 2 cups tepid water, enough to make a wet, but not soupy, dough, and 4 tablespoons of plain sauerkraut juice.  Mixed and covered and left in a warm spot overnight.

 Dough after 12 hours, ready to be transferred to bread pan

In the morning the wheat bran and gluten was noticeably broken down, and had both the sticky texture and pleasantly sour aroma of sourdough, along with some bubbles which meant that it had started to ferment.  I gave the flour a stir, added a good pinch of salt, and poured it, if that's the correct verb, perhaps transferred it into an oiled bread pan.  I let it rise, lightly covered in a warm spot, for another hour or so.  When the surface was slightly raised, maybe only an inch, put it straight into a hot oven, 375F.  Once in the oven it continued to rise into a nice light loaf.  It takes at least an hour to bake, giving it a characteristic thick sourdough crust.

I wish I could share the smell of the loaf coming out of the oven.  It was a perfect sourdough loaf, I could have sworn I was back in San Francisco.  Crusty exterior; chewy, pleasantly sour interior; moist but not too heavy.  And like sourdough bread it keeps longer, neither going stale or moldy as fast as yeasted breads.  Better yet, this recipe has been fool-proof, and oft repeated.  It's the least fussy dough I've ever worked with, and the easiest by far to prepare.

So if you've got a pot of fermenting vegetables hanging around in the cellar, give those hungry little lactobacilli beasties something else to chew on.  To keep my fermenting pot topped up, once the water level drops to an inch above the vegetables, I top up with a brine of 2 Tablespoons sea salt to 1 Quart or Liter of water.  Given a few days, the lactobacilli will have repopulated the brine, ready for another batch of sourdough.

Fermenting in the garden

The August garden is a delightful ramble of green. Hunting out the early fruits feels like a daily treasure hunt. Scraping a light layer of soil back, from underneath overgrown potato bushes, to uncover a few of the new crop. Parting the huge squash leaves to see how the winter squash are coming along.

Lifting cucumber vines, anticipating the first crunchy fruits.

Daily visiting the zucchini bushes, never disappointed with a harvest.

Peering into the thick of the massive tomato bushes for a spot of red.

Eyeing the peppers for any signs of color change.

Snapping off the first tight heads of broccoli.

Protecting the newly forming heads of cabbage from worm damage.

There is a variety and abundance on the table that we haven't experienced since last year's fall harvest. Each meal is a celebration of flavor and accomplishment. And for every meal laid on the table, ten are put up for winter. Besides the usual canning of pail after pail of green beans and shelled peas, I am experimenting with lacto-fermented vegetables. Why wait for the cabbages, when really, just about any vegetable can be fermented? Fermented vegetables make a nice addition to the winter fare, still crisp and full of flavor and vitamins and minerals that the pressure canned vegetables lack.

I'm trying peas first, using the recommended salt ratio of 1 pound for every 5 pounds of vegetables. But this really does taste a bit too salty to me, and the bubbling fermentation process has not started yet on the third day, so I'm going to add more peas. As you can read in the link above, the salt slows the fermentation process, and fermentation can be achieved with very little salt. But the less salt you use, the more risk of surface mold. The most important part of fermenting is to keep the vegetables well submerged below the brine. Some vegetables will produce their own brine, such as shredded and packed cabbage. The salted peas did produce some brine, but not enough to cover, so I added brine to the recommended proportion of 1/4 lb salt to a gallon of water.

The peas in their brine are covered with a clean towel, weighted with a plate and mason jar full of water. There's an inch of brine covering the peas.

I'll also be doing a dill and garlic cucumber crock, lacto-fermented pickles are crisp and wonderfully sour, compared to the limp boiled variety.

Dandelion Wine: out to pasture

There's nothing like a good pasture. The grazers and chickens have all gained a bit of weight and upped the production since the pastures have come up. Penelope, the milking goat, only gets a handful of grain to keep her busy while milking, and the chickens only need about half of their winter ration of grain, to produce twice the eggs. We are able to graze, with no supplement of hay or grain from mid-May to about the end of October here.

The kids are 3 months old now, and have been trained to the electric fence, and introduced into the herd. They are slowly integrating into the herd order, which takes a few weeks, and we had to watch that the does don't bully the kids around too much for the first few days. The two specks on the left of the picture below are the kids, then the two does, and of course Pilgrim, "the big goat", and the movable chicken tractor on the right.
The chickens are also much happier on pasture, they have bugs and greens to peck all day, and I think they are healthier, being moved every day onto clean ground, than they are in the barn with heavy bedding. I even have some extra milk or whey to give them, and the five hens often lay five eggs a day. If you look closely at the hen in the center, you can see some glossy green feather tips. The Rhode Island Red heritage is starting to show on the hens as they mature. Two of them look like straight Barred Rock, and two have green tints, and the white hen has thrown to the Rhode Island White heritage of the original ISA Brown commercial hens.

Roosty shows the most coloring, with red feathers and some long green tail feathers too.

There are some excellent Dandelion patches in the hay fields, it makes great hay too, more nutrition than either the Timothy or Red Clover it was sown to. The Dandelion is in full bloom, which means it's time for Dandelion Wine! Last summer I made some Red Clover and Daisy Blossom Wine. It was good, but I think I will like the Dandelion better. I might make a straight Red Clover wine later this summer, the Daisy added a bitter to the wine.

It didn't take long to gather 6 or so quarts of Dandelion flowers. I followed a simple recipe. Pour 6 quarts boiling water over the flowers. Cover and let steep for 24 hours. Strain the flowers out, pressing the liquid through a muslin cloth. Add 3 lbs organic sugar or honey, the grated rind and juice of a lemon and an orange (I don't have fresh citrus, so I use dried orange and lemon peel, and a dozen cardamom pods), and a pound of Golden Raisins. Stir until sugar is dissolved. Dissolve one package yeast in a cup of warm water and a teaspoon of sugar, add to the liquid mixture. Set crock or jar in a warm spot, away from drafts or direct sunlight. Cover loosely, and stir every day for three weeks. Pour into bottles, corking loosely to let excess gas escape, and store in a dark cool room. When fermentation is complete, cork tightly. Ready to enjoy in 6 months.

Making goat's butter and yogurt

The kids are weaned off milk, we started weaning them at 8 weeks old, and completed the transition to warm water in the end of their 9th week. They are grass burners now, and they are doing quite well on a few bales of the best hay in the barn. Watching their condition closely for signs of dropping weight, we have been ready to feed them some grain, but their condition has held and even started to gain again in the last few days, and we would prefer not to feed them any grain as it changes the bacteria and pH balance in their rumens.

Now that the milk is all ours, I have been rubbing my hands together with all of my dairy desires. Butter and yogurt are on the top of the list. I have a mid 20th century cream separator, designed for the home dairy in mind, but that would be the home cow dairy. It is inefficient to put less than a gallon through the separator, so I saved up milk for two days, so that I would have a gallon and a half. When we were milking a Jersey cow, I separated the cream twice a day, and also had to wash the darn thing twice a day. So I am quite happy to reduce that chore to once every two days.


The milk must be warm to separate, between 95-105F, so I warmed it on top of a pan of boiling water, double-boiler style, to be sure that the milk did not scald.


The cream separator works just as well for the goat's cream as it did for the cow's cream. In fact, I think it separated better with the temperature of the milk above 100F. Cream is more viscous when it is warm, and does not stick to the discs inside of the separator as much. My pail of fresh cow's milk, after being filtered, would likely have cooled down to 85 to 95F by the time it made it to the separator. When I took the cream separator apart after the first run with the goat's milk, I noticed that very little cream had been left inside.


One perk of using a cream separator is that it makes perfect cappuccinos! I worked as a barrista at a fancy restaurant in my city days, and in my prime could hardly have made such perfect peaks as these.

I collected cream for 6 days, until I had a quart. It took about 4 gallons of milk to make a quart of cream, which would work out to 4% butterfat. The cream is perfectly white, instead of the rich creamy color of Jersey cream, but it has a delicate and mild flavor, and it kept well without going sour. I actually think that the goat's cream has a more mild flavor than the Jersey cream, and I had more problems with cream spoilage. I could usually only keep the Jersey cream for 4-5 days max before it would start to sour and make off-flavored butter. But not so with the goat's cream, it was still sweet and fresh on the sixth day.

Again, my butter churn is designed for the home cow dairy, and can fit up to 2.5 quarts of cream, but one quart is the minimum. It came with a small hand-crank, and I used to turn that handle for at least 20 minutes before churning the butter out, but Mr. Fritillary, always looking to improve designs, fitted the drill onto the shaft that the handle was screwed onto, and made churning butter into a 3 minute job.

For an excellent tutorial on making butter at home, head on over to Throwback at Trapper Creek's blog and read her post "Butter me up".

The goat's cream behaved just the same as cow's cream, except that it can be worked at a slightly lower temperature, between 55-60F.

The butter is pure white, and again, I would use the word delicate to describe it. Both in texture and in flavor. It was slightly softer than cow's butter when I was working the buttermilk out, due to the factor that it seems to melt at a lower temperature. I made sure to drain off the buttermilk first, it was sweet just like the cream, and great for baking.

The butter is delicious, creamy, mild, and not at all "goaty". Never once, in my home goat dairy experience, have I found either the milk, or any products of it, to be "goaty" in flavor or smell. We did try some goat's milk from the farmer's market before buying our goats, and found it to be slightly tangy, but not off-putting, and figured we would get used to the flavor. But the flavor of the milk, whether cow or goat, is often due to handling, cleanliness and freshness. And our own goat's milk is fresh, clean and from a healthy animal, and that makes all the difference.

One quart of cream makes one pound of butter, so I should be getting one pound of butter every 6 days, along with a quart of yogurt a day, and 1.5 quarts of skimmed milk a day. And that is with a single dairy-cross goat. It is perfect for us, and we would be able to put away plenty of milk and butter for the dry-season, as well as making cheeses, with one more dairy-cross, or with just one pure dairy goat. But with the two dairy-cross does, we will also be able to provide for our own meat as well, from the kids. And two does still consume about 1/3 the amount of one small dairy cow.

I couldn't resist making up some buttermilk pancakes with fresh butter, what a treat!

And with all of that extra skimmed milk, made some yogurt. Dairy heaven! In the past, I have purchased store-bought yogurt, Balkan style, with active acidophilus cultures, as my yogurt starter. But I thought I'd try the freeze-dried packets at the health food store. It has three bacterial cultures, including acidophilus.

The resulting yogurt has a thinner texture than I expected, but creamy and well flavored, slightly-tangy. In my second batch, I used 1/2 cup of yogurt from the previous batch, to culture each quart. I'm not sure that this yogurt will work well for drained-yogurt, a cream-cheese-like spread. If not, then I will try again with the Balkan style yogurt starter.

Blossom Wine

My homemade Red Clover and Daisy Blossom wine is ready just in time for the new year, and the heart of winter. A touch of wine on a snowy afternoon warms my cheeks in place of the sun. I'm a wimp when it comes to alcohol, and Mr. Fritillary is a teetotaller, so we don't need much. I drink my wine like tea: 1/4 cup wine, a drizzle of honey and hot water. It has a distinctively floral taste, and pleasantly warms the belly. I made this first batch of wine in mid-July when the daisies and clover were in abundant bloom. But I missed the dandelions which I have read, make a sweet golden wine. Next June I'll start a batch of dandelion wine.

For this blossom wine I altered a Daisy wine recipe from "Edible Garden Weeds of Canada". This is my recipe:

3 Liters or Quarts Daisy Blossoms* (Ox-Eye Daisy Chrysanthemum leucanthemum grows in my area, but English Daisy Bellis perennis can also be used)

3 Liters or Quarts Red Clover Blossoms* (Trifolium pratense)

no stems or leaves

*Always be absolutely sure of plant identification before collecting or consuming any wild plant. I use Petersons Field Guide to Edible Wild Plants to aid identification.

6 Liters or Quarts boiling water

1.5 Kg or 3 1/4 lbs organic raw sugar or honey

500g or 1 lb chopped dates (can use raisins or sultanas)

500g or 1 lb whole wheat kernels

1 Tbsp each dried orange and lemon peel (can use zest and juice of 2 oranges and 2 lemons if available)

6 cardamom pods and 6 cloves (can be omitted or substituted for favorite spices/herbs, ie cinnamon, mint, vanilla, anise, lavender, etc)

1 pkg or 2 tsp dry active yeast

Wash blossoms, by submerging in water to expel any insects. Place flowers in stone crock, glass or food grade plastic, pour boiling water over blossoms, and let stand 24 hours. Filter out blossoms and add remaining ingredients (except yeast) to the liquid. Stir until sugar or honey is dissolved. Dissolve yeast in 1/2 cup water and 1tsp sugar. Let yeast stand 10 minutes, then add to mixture. Cover with clean cloth or muslin and let stand at room temperature (same as for rising bread) 3 weeks, stirring daily. After 3-4 weeks when no more bubbles rise, filter liquid into bottles and cork lightly. ** (I used mason jars with loosely screwed plastic lids.) When fermentation is complete (no gas is released), tighten cork or lids. Store in a cool, dark place until wine is clear. Should be matured for drinking in 6 months.

Makes about 3 Liters or Quarts of wine due to evaporation.

**At this point you could put aside a portion, or all, to make blossom vinegar by adding mother to the wine. See Apple Cider Vinegar.

Tasting the sauerkraut

Boy, you can't beat homemade kraut! I have this revelation every time I try something homemade for the first time, that I had never really tasted it until then. I was an ambivalent eater of sauerkraut until this week. Now I'm a convert.

We came home from the internet access center, late one afternoon, both of us particularly hungry, for it was a cold evening and we work up an appetite on our bikes. But it had been a busy morning, and untypically, I did not have a hot meal waiting for us in the oven. But we had boiled some of our brisket cuts in salted water, from the two year old bull-calf we recently butchered. This makes a kind of pseudo corned-beef that will keep in the cold room for a week, as a cold cut. And there was bread in the cabinet, and the sauerkraut was due for it's first tasting. So into the frying pan went olive oil, a few cups of kraut and some dill seed and caraway seed. I could have chopped a few onions in there too. And next some sliced beef soaking up the remaining oils and flavor. A little gravy on the side and toast in the oven. With a sprig of fresh parsley from a plant I transplanted into a pot for winter nibbling. And within 10 minutes we had a delicious nutritious entirely homegrown and homemade meal that not only satisfied our appetite and nourished our bodies, but put a smile of satisfaction on our faces, just looking down at the plate in front of us. What a blessing.

Ditch the Fridge Challenge

I challenge you to Ditch your Fridge! With cooler, or down-right cold, weather coming on, it is a perfect time to challenge your dependence on your refrigerator.

When we moved off-grid, we came with a small fridge and small chest freezer. We had a small generator, battery bank and a solar panel. We could run the darn things, but it was ridiculously expensive to produce enough power to keep our food stored this way. I didn't keep much beyond dairy products in the fridge at the time, without a cream separator, the fridge was pretty full with pots of whole milk, bottles of cream and yogurt. Once it was skimmed, the milk was turned into cheese or fed out. I kept some leftovers in there, where space allowed, but mostly my fridge was an integral part of our dairy processing. The freezer was full of our year's supply of meat, some frozen vegetables and fruit, and extra butter and frozen milk to last through a two month dry period, before the cow calved again.

When we realized we had to make some changes, figuring out how to do without refrigeration was a huge challenge to the milk maid in me. I could do without the freezer, canning the meat, vegetables, fruit, and even the milk for the dry spell. What to do with the extra butter, stumped me until Mr. Fritillary enlightened me about ghee, a traditional Indian or Hindu way of processing butter into pure butterfat, which stores at room temperature like oil. So that took care of storing butter, when fresh butter is not in season. The freezer was soon empty.

I was hesitant to ditch the fridge, but with winter coming on, I was able to cool my twice-daily pot of filtered milk, in a basin of cold water, and let the cream rise in an unheated room that kept at refrigerator temperatures. I could also keep my cream and yogurt in the cold room, as long as winter lasted. But I knew I would need a cream separator by spring. We found one in time for warmer weather. Now I only had our daily table milk, a few liters of cream, a few liters of yogurt, and a pound of fresh butter to keep cold at one time. We do not have a spring or any running water on our property, but the water from the well stays quite cold, even in the heat of summer. We took an old camp cooler, and filled it with cold well water, and submerged everything into the water. Even the butter went into pint jars, same as leftovers or opened bottles of applesauce, etc.

The cooler is on an outside porch, where no direct sun falls on it at any time. In the heat of summer the water must be changed two or three times daily. I put the fresh milk, and separated cream into cold water, morning and night. And change it if need be again in the middle of the day. Come spring and fall, the water only needs to be changed in the evening, the cool night air keeps it cold, and does not start to warm up until late afternoon. In the winter, I change it every few days to keep the water from going stale, and even have to bring the cooler into an unheated room to keep it from freezing out on the porch.

Refrigeration can be done many ways. A small pump from the well can run to a cooling basin, with an overflow, to simulate a spring. Water is a more stable cooling element than air, so it works well. But air can be cooled by a small fan pushing air past a mist or trickle of cool water. In hotter climates, the ground temperature a few feet down can be cool enough to store food.

But designing a way to cool and store your food is only part of the challenge. You may also have to change the way you cook, and even the types of food you eat, to ditch the fridge. Take a look at the contents of your fridge. Eggs and many cheeses can be stored in a cool cabinet. Eggs store quite well at 60-70F for at least two weeks. The only reason they are refrigerated at the grocery store is so they can be kept for 3-6 months. Homemade preserves, pickles and jams will keep in a cool cabinet or submerged in the cooler, for a week, so preserve your food in one week sized portions. With a backyard garden, produce is eaten straight from the garden, and with the exception of lettuce, will keep in a cool cabinet for a few days. Vegetables like shelled peas or broccoli heads can be put into a jar or water-proof container, and submerged in the cooler and will keep fresh for a day or two. For the most part, the refrigerator only prolongs the distance food takes to get to your table. The fresher your food is, the less you will need your refrigerator.

The challenge I have set for myself next year is to expand my range of fermented vegetables. Many people prefer to freeze vegetables over canning them for the nutritional value that is maintained in frozen vegetables. More than just cabbage can be fermented, including beans, cauliflower, roots, and cucumbers. Even a medley of vegetables, onions, peppers, garlic and herbs can be fermented together. Fermentation preserves the nutritional content, since vitamins are never destroyed by heat, and pathogens are kept from spoiling the food with friendly-bacteria that also add their own health benefits to the foods. And fermented foods can be kept for months, or even a year, in a cool room at 50-60F.

Ditching the fridge is not only environmentally progressive, it can wean you off of a dependence on consistently available cheap power, and give you the opportunity to change your relationship to the food you eat.

Viva la Kraut!

Thanks to Paul at A posse ad esse, I was encouraged to try my hand at making saurkraut. I have been a reader of Weston Price material, and know that fermented food is great for health, I am a fan of yogurt, but like Paul, had never incorporated saurkraut in my diet. But I did put in a few cabbages this spring with the intention of trying a batch.

Like the apple cider vinegar, turning cabbages to saurkraut is really quite simple. I used the ratio I have seen in many blogs and books: 5lbs shreaded cabbage to 3 Tbsp salt. I had 7lbs of cabbage, cored, and sliced as thin as I could with a large knife. The cabbage is Early Jersey Wakefield, it's a summer cabbage dating back to the 1700's, and it is one of the only open pollinated varieties I can find up here in Canada. The heads will not store over the winter unless they are fermented.I tossed it with the salt, mixing it well, and packed it into a gallon jar, tamping it down with my fist until the juice started to run and fill most of the air pockets between the shreaded cabbage. Then to seal the cabbage from the air, and to keep it below the brine, a clean plastic bag filled with brine sits atop. Thanks Paul, for sharing that great tip!
It's alive! Within 24 hours my batch of saurkraut started bubbling and fermenting. I set it next to the fermenting apple juice, behind the stove. I'm not sure if the same micro-critters colonize the briny cabbage, but it's caught the fermentation fever. So now all I do is remove and rinse the bag once every week, and wait about 4 weeks for the taste test.

New batch of Apple Cider Vinegar

It is time to start this year's batch of apple cider vinegar. We used up the first harvest of early, unbruised apples for drying and preserving. By the second week of October, most of the apples had fallen to the ground, making for easy collecting in these unpruned wild trees. We went back to the abandoned apple orchard in the neighboring forest and collected the last of this year's apples. One of the trees produces small red apples with good flavor, these will be my cider apples. Late apples make good cider because of the high sugar content.

Last year was my first try at making vinegar. Not only was it easy, but the vinegar beat anything I had ever tasted, including the organic raw apple cider vinegar from the health food store. So I am doubling my batch this year, 12 quarts.

What do I use all of this apple cider vinegar for? It does make a great gift, and of course it makes delicious salad dressing. I also use it to make a hot cider tea in the winter: 1 Tbsp cider vinegar, 1 Tbsp honey, dash of cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamom (use your tastebuds), fill the mug with steaming water. But I also have a few recipes that have become favorites. I call it Faux Kraut, but if anyone comes up with a better name, let me know...

4 lbs root vegetables grated (turnip, carrot, parsnip in any combination, or singly)
1 lb onion chopped
1 lb sweet potato diced (if available)
Heat in heavy bottomed pot with about 1/4 cup oil or butter
Sautee onions, then add vegetables, stir to dress evenly with oil or butter
Add 1/4 cup apple cider vinegar
2 Tbsp honey
1 cup Applesauce or diced apples or 1/4 cup dried apples chopped fine
1 tsp carraway seed, 1 tsp dill seed, 1 1/2 tsp mustard seed, salt and pepper to taste
optional: 2 Tbsp pumpkin seed (or other seed or nut)
Remove to low heat until cooked through
Serve with meatballs, dumplings or sausage.

For a simpler variation, I love julianned carrots (or other root veg), steamed in equal parts cider vinegar and water (enough to prevent burning), and honey to taste.

This is the last of 2007's apple cider vinegar, with the mother at the bottom. It may come in handy later in the vinegar making process.
For making cider, I don't bother to core or peel the apples. I cut out large bruises, and remove the stems because they clog my juicer. I simply cut the apples into a size that easily fits in my juicer. It is a great way to use up all of the small apples that would be tedious to core and peel. This is a second hand juicer I piced up for $2. So you don't need any kind of professional equipment to get the job done. A cider press would definately sqeeze more juice out of the pulp, but for small batch vinegar making it wouldn't make much sense to invest in a large press that would be used once a year. One pound of apples makes about one cup of juice. Half of the juice evaporates in the vinegar process, so 2 quarts of apple juice makes 1 quart cider vinegar. You can also make vinegar from purchased unpasturized apple juice (or any unpasturized juice for that matter).
These ceramic crocks work great, but any glass jar will do. The juice is covered with a clean towel and placed in a warm spot, a sunny window or near my wood stove, about 80F is ideal. 60-70F will do, just slows the process down. (The same principles apply for rising yeast breads).

The sugars are turning into alcohol with the help of yeast. I have plenty of wild yeast in my kitchen from bread baking, and the juice begins to ferment and bubble within 24 hours. Once a day for a few weeks I skim the surface. Mold will form on the scum if not removed and spoil the batch. The cider has a pleasant, slightly alcoholic aroma, and I usually sneak a taste of the hard cider before it becomes vinegar.

Within a few weeks there is no scum to remove, and no bubbles rise when stirred. At this point, the alcohol is turning to acetic acid (vinegar), with the help of another microscopic beastie. Some recipes recommend adding "mother of vinegar" to aid the fermentation. Mother is the cloudy precipitation at the bottom of raw vinegars, Braggs or Eden brands contain mother. But it may be that the store bought vinegar affects the flavor of my homemade vinegar. So last year, I waited to see if it would form it's own mother when left undisturbed. And slowly, a thin grey film formed on the surface, almost like an oil slick. I left it be for a few weeks, then began to taste it for strength. When it tasted right to me, I filtered it and stored it in bottles in my cool, dark pantry. I began to use it right away, but after a few months, the flavor mellowed and became more complex. Like a good wine it improved with age.

Can't wait to find out how this year's batch tastes. For more detailed instructions on vinegar making, and using vinegar, The Vinegar Man is my favorite site.