Have you ever bought a flavoured vinegar from the grocery store? A delicious herb vinegar, or perhaps a fruity or berry vinegar? They are crazy expensive compared to buying a gallon jug of vinegar and making your own at home. Perhaps they aren’t even available in the grocery store you typically frequent. Even if this isn’t something you’d necessarily typically buy, I bet you would find many uses for them, and they make a lovely gift. Flavoured vinegars make delicious salad dressings, marinades and sauces and are a great use of excess herbs in the garden too. I just picked a ton of sage, dill, and rosemary because it got way out of hand in my garden and made an herb vinegar from it. It’s really quite nice! I wish I still had oregano and basil too! Flavoured vinegars are simply made from soaking fruit or herbs in vinegar until they reach the desired strength of flavour. The OSU extension publication on this topic is great, SP 50-736, and here I’ll show some pictures of the ones I’ve made so far – herb, strawberry and raspberry. Some of these things are off season, but you can still use frozen fruit, things that are still in season, like citrus and cranberries, garlic and peppers, or perhaps you grow herbs inside, still have some growing, or have some you dried or froze. The options are endless, so let’s get started!

Here are my strawberry and raspberry vinegars on the day I was straining them. Such a beautiful red colour!! Strawberry one is partially poured off to strain.

For making flavoured vinegar, the easiest thing to use is just a quart or half gallon canning jar. Any glass or food grade plastic container will do though. Wash the jars and sterilize them by boiling for ten minutes. Select whatever type of vinegar you’d like to use and buy it in bulk by the gallon. I typically just use white vinegar, but white wine vinegar is very nice as well, or apple cider. Or go ahead and get crazy and mix vinegars together. I remember when we made them in Master Food Preserver class Janice saying that flavoured vinegars are awesome because there are basically no rules. It’s certainly much more true than canning. Keep things sanitized and clean but otherwise you can get creative.

For flavouring your vinegar, you’ll use herbs, fruits, or vegetables. For herbs you want a few sprigs of fresh herb per pint. Wash, pat dry, add to the jar and cover with vinegar. If using dried, use 3 tablespoons of herbs per pint of vinegar. For fruits you can use fresh or frozen and basically just fill your jar about 2/3 or so full with rinsed fruit and fill the jar to cover with vinegar. You want about a 1:1 ratio of fruit to the vinegar covering it. Feel free to add extra spices, and get creative. Vegetables, such as peppers, onions and garlic can also be used to flavour vinegar. Get creative and have fun. Basically fill your jar and let them sit.

Leave your vinegar alone for at least a couple of weeks. Three or four weeks is enough to achieve a nice flavour, but longer isn’t going to hurt anything. I made my strawberry one in May and didn’t get around to straining it until November. It’s dang delicious. Basically you can strain it whenever you taste it and are happy with the flavour. If it gets too strong, simply dilute it down with more of the vinegar you had used to make it in the first place.

When it’s time to strain, sterilize a jar of the same size that you have your vinegar in, place a funnel in the jar, and add a coffee filter or cheesecloth. Pour the vinegar into the filter.

It can take a while to strain so be patient and change the filter out a couple of times if you need to. Depending on what type vinegar you made, the filters may get clogged. Herb vinegars just with large leaves tend to drain fast but if you have some fruit that breaks apart it may take a little longer and clog up the filter. Just be patient and swap it for a new filter a couple of times.

A strainer and a coffee filter will also do just fine.

Keep going until you get all the vinegar strained. Then store it in whatever cleaned and sanitized containers you would like to.

These are the jars I’ve used to store my vinegar. The little ones are actually from tonic water and the large one is an old marinade jar. You can also just store them in canning jars of course. I would go for glass over plastic personally. To keep track of what I have, I love adding cute labels to things, and also when giving them as gifts. For these I’ve used the Avery 22922 labels which are 2×2 inches. I love them because you just download the template from their website and print whatever you want on the label. The round ones are Avery 22926. They’ll fit on a regular mouth jar, just barely so you have to be careful applying them, but they are awesome for wide mouth lids. They also sell 2 inch diameter ones rather than the 2.5 inch, Avery 22807. It’s always a good idea to label with all your ingredients as well. Label with your base vinegar, fruits, herbs, vegetables or spices added. This would be cute as a back label. It could also be nice, if giving this as a gift, to include a recipe for what you might use the vinegar for, such as a favourite salad dressing recipe.

They are also really cute stored in fancy jars. I think I might get a set of these ones. After straining them you can also add another sprig of herb for decoration if you so desire.

To maintain flavour and colour, you can add a small amount of sugar as well, but I don’t generally like to do that or feel it’s that necessary. Store in a cool dark place. You can keep it in the refrigerator if you want, but it is not necessary. You can also actually can it in a boiling water bath canner for 10 minutes, but it’s pretty shelf stable as is so that’s also not mandatory. But of course don’t use it if off flavours, colours or odours develop. Enjoy!

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