“CVO — chief vinegar officer” reads Andy Harris’s business card. It’s a little light-heartedness in an enterprise that he otherwise takes very seriously. In his garden shed he has barrel after barrel lined up, each chalked up to chart its slow conversion from wine to vinegar. “Bordeaux — 6/16,” reads one; “Rioja,” another; “Minervois,” a third. These are just his homemade “London vinegars”. Elsewhere he has bottle after bottle of mainly French imports: vinegars made from Calvados apples, vinegars flavoured with blackcurrant, or with saffron.
It is from here, in this quiet corner of west London, that he hopes to revolutionise the way we think about what most of us treat as a one-size-fits-all commodity; something to pour on chips or make into a salad dressing.
Raspberry, tarragon and blueberry vinegars
DAVID LOFTUS
“People think they need only one sort of vinegar, that it will cover all the bases, but they are so wrong,” he says, reaching for a bottle of thyme flower-flavoured vinegar made by Cistercian nuns in southwest France. He pours a tot for me to taste and it has the acidity you’d expect, but also a mellowness undercut with a wonderful floral note. “Good vinegar can be used like a good olive oil to add a finishing touch,” he says. “Just imagine this drizzled over a piece of fish.”
The chef Mitch Tonks has been imagining just that and recently took a large order for his restaurants in Dartmouth. So has Jamie Oliver. Jeremy Lee at Quo Vadis and Tim Hughes at the Caprice are also interested. “If I went to chefs and said I had some great olive oils, or even balsamic vinegars, they’d laugh me out of the door, but this is so different they are all amazed by it,” says Harris.
Balsamic vinegar was ubiquitous in the Nineties, but recent enthusiasm for vinegar has largely been confined to clean eaters, who swear by its detoxing effects, or hipsters, who have embraced the American shrub cocktail, where vinegar replaces bitters to balance the sweetness of any fruit. A vinegar-based cocktail (similar to a Tom Collins) is a big hit at the trendy Rumpus Room at Mondrian London, and the London restaurant Caravan serves a shot made with house-fermented apple cider vinegar, raw honey and lime.
What chefs and keen cooks know is that vinegar is the secret ingredient that can lift or balance a dish. A tablespoon added to a curry or tomato sauce can make it sing and is as much part of a cook’s armoury of seasoning as salt, pepper or lemon juice.
Besides the obvious uses in vinaigrettes or pickling, Harris adds vinegar to his casseroles, and he’ll poach fruit in cider vinegar sweetened with honey. A tarragon vinegar might enhance a roast chicken, a raspberry vinegar might be drizzled over a salad. He has a vinegar flavoured with cloves and cinnamon that he says is perfect for deglazing pan-fried duck and a ginger vinegar that’s perfect for sushi. These vinegars are given the same respect as a single-estate olive oil (and prices to match: from £12 for 500ml of Famille Dupont cider vinegar to £20.50 for 250ml of those nuns’ walnut vinegar). “Commercial, pasteurised vinegars just aren’t the same,” Harris says. He also sells all the kit you need to make your own.
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You need a ‘mother’, which is a big bit of bacteria that forms a gelatinous mass
If the end product is analogous to extra virgin olive oil, producing vinegar has more in common with making sourdough bread. “You can’t just pour wine into a pot and hope it will turn into vinegar,” says Harris, who has been making his own for 20 years. “You need a ‘mother’, which is a big bit of bacteria that forms a gelatinous mass. It is this and air that turns wine into vinegar.”
Once you’ve created (or bought) this it will keep going and multiply as long as you feed it with more wine and don’t let it dry out. You can add the wine all in one go, or do as the French do and add any dregs from your day-to-day consumption. A pot of wine will take anything from two to six months to turn into vinegar, depending on the temperature of your kitchen. After that it is ready for you to do with as you will, either straight away or after further ageing in a wooden barrel to help it to mellow and take on more complexity.
Harris serves a little as a digestif after a large meal. And if you find your batch too astringent, he has another use for it: “It is quite brilliant for cleaning with.”
vinegarshed.com
Chicken escabeche
Serves 4-6
Ingredients
1 chicken, jointed into eight pieces
3 tbsp olive oil
2 white onions, peeled and thinly sliced
3 garlic cloves, peeled and thinly sliced
8 baby carrots, peeled whole
3 bay leaves
1 tbsp black peppercorns
1 tsp cumin
1 tbsp wild thyme (flowers, if possible)
100ml dry white wine
200ml cider vinegar
Green salad and crusty bread, to serve
Method
1 Season the chicken pieces generously with sea salt and freshly ground black pepper.
2 Heat the olive oil in a large casserole dish over medium heat and sauté the chicken pieces for about 15-20 min, turning occasionally or until skin has turned golden brown.
3 Transfer the chicken pieces with a slotted spoon to a plate. Add the onions, garlic, carrots, bay leaves, peppercorns, cumin and thyme to the casserole dish and sauté for 5-7 min, or until the onion and carrots have softened.
4 Add the wine and vinegar and cook for 5 min. Put the chicken pieces back in the casserole dish and continue to cook for 25-30 min, or until they are cooked. Allow to cool, then transfer the chicken escabeche to a serving bowl, cover with clingfilm and refrigerate overnight to allow flavours to develop.
5 Remove from the refrigerator and serve with a green salad and crusty bread.
Dining and Cooking