Here’s a personal warning from me to you…beware of getting into food fermentation…it’s completely addicting! What started out with attempting kimchi and apple cider vinegar has grown into making vinegars from wine and beer, all kinds of fruit scraps, including pineapple, ginger beer, shrubs, pickles, krauts, sourdough starter, and I’m looking to get into making tempeh and miso too! I. Can’t. Stop. It’s just so fun and satisfying!

Alan calls me the Mad Scientist with my fermentation corner in our walk-in pantry threatening to overtake the entire space!

We’re just finishing up strawberry season here in the Pacific Northwest, so I’ve been busy doing a lot of cooking, freezing, and jam-making with our delicious fresh berries. Not only do we have conventional strawberries, but our property is covered with mounds and mounds of Wood Strawberries, a Northwest Native wild strawberry. The Wood Strawberries are super fragrant, but very dry, seedy, and not super sweet, but they have great strawberry flavor. I’ve been adding these to other strawberry dishes to supplement.

As I was preparing the berries, I couldn’t get myself to compost the berry tops or berries that were overripe, smashed, or had bites taken out of them by the illustrious Pacific Northwest slug and robins (yes, the robins that nested in the gutter garden have returned to eat strawberries!). I kept thinking I should be able to do something with them. And then it struck me…what about vinegar?

Well it turned out fabulously! Here’s the process:

Put your strawberry scraps, bruised, slug- or bird-bitten berries, and tops into a large jar. Just make sure your scraps aren’t moldy, you don’t want to use those. If you’re prepping berries over several days or weeks, you can store the berry scraps in the freezer until you’re ready to make vinegar.

Make a sugar solution with a ratio of 1/2 cup of sugar to 1 quart of water and when it is at room temperature, pour it over the berry scraps. Make sure the solution covers the berries but only comes 1/2 to 3/4 of the way to the top of the jar so it doesn’t overflow when you weigh down the scraps.

To weigh down the scraps, I simply cover the surface of the scraps with several canning jar lids before adding a lidded jar full of water on top. You want to contain the scraps to prevent them from floating to the surface where they will get exposed to the air and mold, and I find that the canning jar lids, particularly old, clean, used ones, work great for this. You can also use a fermentation weight made specifically for this purpose.

Next cover your jar opening with cheesecloth or a towel and secure with a rubberband. This keeps fruit flies out. I like using a towel because it’s reusable and also works to keep light off the contents. Put into a dark, room temperature location, like a pantry, cupboard, or closet, covered with a towel to keep out any light.

Check your jar every day for the next several weeks. Pull off any scraps that float to the surface and give the solution a taste. You’ll notice that the solution gets more red and strawberry-flavored (it’s like the best strawberry soda!), then turns a bit fizzy, then alcohol-y. It’s basically a strawberry cider.

Once you’ve reached this point, in about three weeks, strain off the solids and put the solution into a clean jar. You’ll notice that the solution is rather cloudy, that’s ok. It’s full of microorganisms that will transform the solution to vinegar and will get strained off later. The strained berries can be fed to composting worms or go into your compost pile/bin.

If you have a vinegar mother from making a previous batch of vinegar (always save your vinegar mothers in a jar to use again), add it to the strained solution, it makes the process go faster. If you don’t have a vinegar mother, you can use the mother from a commercial vinegar that has the mother in it, like Bragg’s Apple Cider Vinegar.

Cover the jar as you did earlier and return it to where you kept the jar before. Check on it every week or so. Give it a taste and see how the vinegar is progressing. You’ll notice that the alcohol taste and smell starts to diminish and the sour, vinegar grows stronger. Once it’s reached your liking, pour through a fine-mesh strainer to remove the mother and get as many of the infiltrates out as possible, then pour the vinegar into a lidded bottle. Save the mother for another batch. Your vinegar will be a bit cloudy at first, but that will settle.

Store your vinegar in a cupboard or pantry. Use this strawberry-sweet vinegar in dressings, especially on fruit salads or green salads with fruit or berries. It’s also great as a shrub for making cocktails or mocktails, adding it to champagne, spirits, or sparkling water. Strawberry vinegar also makes a beautiful and unique gift! If you don’t use it very frequently, you may want to go and open the bottle every once in a while to release any pressure buildup from any latent fermentation going on.

I hope you give this a try. It’s wonderful!