Making Pear Vinegar by Lacto-Fermentation

In the height of summer I wrote about salting plums and letting them ferment.

Lacto-Fermented Plums

It comes from "The Noma Guide To Fermentation (Foundations Of Flavor) ", the book of fermentation recipes overseen by Noma in Copenhagen, often called the best restaurant in the world, which is full of ideas for lactic fermentation.

The lacto plums and their vinegar were both excellent, and the vinegar earned its keep in dressings all summer. Making a fruit vinegar for each season is genuinely enjoyable, the flavour is different every time, and it widens what you can cook — so I intend to keep trying things.

This time, the shops were full of pears, so I decided to salt those.

Ingredients:

• Pears
• Salt (2% of the weight of the pears once peeled and cored)
• Storage jar
• Zip-lock bag

1. Peel and core the pears, then cut each into eight.

2. Put them in a bowl and coat them evenly with the measured salt.

3. Put the salted pears from step 2 into a sterilised container and weight them down.

* A zip-lock bag placed inside the container and filled with water makes a good weight.

4. Within a few hours liquid comes out of the pears; once the fruit is fully submerged, leave it at room temperature for several days. In summer, lactic fermentation starts and the acidity comes through in two or three days.

5. This time it reached a good level of acidity around day four, so I strained it and separated the liquid from the fruit.

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How it turned out

The pear juice had far less character than I expected, and it was sweet. The plum vinegar I made before was sharply acidic with a strong plum flavour — easy to picture using in cooking as a vinegar with real personality. This pear vinegar is sweet enough that it is hard to use on its own as the acid in a dressing. Although it might change with more ageing.

And after a while sitting in a jar in the fridge, it did change. Presumably because of the sugar, a carbonic fermentation began and it started to smell of alcohol. The sugars that the lactic fermentation did not get through appear to be fermenting into alcohol. Tasting it, it was close to cider — the apple kind. Perhaps with more time it will go on to acetic fermentation.

I will keep using it in cooking now and again and watch what happens.