It’s the start of apple season, even up north here in Fairbanks. That means it’s the start of eating fresh apples and making homemade apple pies, applesauce, dried apples, apple cider, and apple cider vinegar. Fairbanks is a tough place to grow apples. Below -40F temperatures make growing a challenge although there have been great strides in recent years in successfully growing apples in Interior Alaska, apple trees other than crab apples that is.  I, unfortunately, are not swimming in an abundance of apples, because I only bought my apple trees this year, other fruit such as blueberries for pie yes, apples no. But I always make sure I harvest enough local apples for apple cider vinegar.

 

I created the following recipe from Sandor Katz’s book ‘The Art of Fermentation‘, which I highly recommend for anybody wanting to ferment foods. It doesn’t read like a standard cookbook but more like a  textbook in college covering the theory, history, and background of fermentation, so sometimes you have to do quite a bit of reading to figure out the recipes. For a more basic recipe friendly cookbook try ‘Wild Fermentation’ by Sandor Katz.   For this recipe, I read the sections on ‘Vinegar’, ‘Kombucha’, and ‘Cider and Perry’ and combined them. I was lucky enough to see Sandor Katz give a talk in Fairbanks a couple years ago and he truly inspires people to ferment.  And he makes it sound so easy, an approachable practice that anyone can do. I have to agree with him.

The following apple cider vinegar recipe makes about 3/4 of a gallon of vinegar.  If I pick and buy my apples from the local and only apple orchard near Fairbanks, Clair’s Cultivation, then I bet this recipe costs me ~$10.00.  This is compared to buying a gallon of organic Bragg’s Apple Cider Vinegar for $35.00 in Fairbanks. As a bonus apple cider vinegar is fun to make and requires a minimal amount of time and skill at fermenting.  This amount of vinegar lasts me almost a year. I make sure and save the remaining two cups to use as a starter for the next batch.

Fermenting does not require special equipment, just a non-reactive container that holds your vegetables fully submerged in the brine. With that said I love my fermenting crock, it takes the guesswork out of fermenting and eliminates those pesky problems that fermenting can be prone to such as my favorite, surface mold and/or Kahm yeast (a harmless yeast that appears when a ferment is exposed to air).

Many people are nervous about consuming their fermented food. One of my favorite guidelines for fermenting is you would never eat a bad batch of fermented food. When it goes bad it essentially rots and you will know it.

 

Let me know what you end up using your apple cider vinegar for and what type of apples you used. The vinegar can develop different flavors depending on the apples used.