Wildcrafted Vinegars

Book excerpt: Award-winning author and forager Pascal Baudar uncovers incredible flavors and inspiring recipes to create unique, place-based vinegars using any landscape. Includes more than 100 delicious, easy recipes for quick pickles, soups, sauces, salad dressings, beverages, desserts, jams, and more! After covering yeast fermentation (The Wildcrafting Brewer) and lactic acid fermentation (Wildcrafted Fermentation), pioneering food expert Pascal Baudar completes his wild fermentation trilogy by tackling acetic acid ferments and the wide array of dishes you can create with them. Baudar delves deeply into the natural world for wild-gathered flavors: herbs, fruits, berries, roots, mushrooms—even wood, bark, and leaves—that play a vital part in infusing distinctive gourmet-quality vinegars. More than 100 recipes show how to use homemade vinegars to make a wide range of delicious foods: quick pickles, soups, sauces, salad dressings, beverages, desserts, jams, and other preserves. Recipes include: • Pine, fir, and spruce–infused vinegar • Smoked mushroom and seaweed vinegar • Blueberry-mugwort vinegar • Wilder curry vinaigrette • Wasabi ginger vinegar sauce • Pickled walnuts • Mountain oxymel • And many more! Once you’ve mastered the basic methods for making and aging vinegars at home, you might be inspired to experiment on your own and find local plants that express the unique landscape and terroir wherever you happen to live. Or you might decide to forage for ingredients in your own garden or at a local farmers market instead. Either way, Pascal Baudar is an experienced and encouraging guide to safe and responsible wild-gathering and food preservation. “Pascal Baudar is a culinary visionary.”—Sandor Ellix Katz, author of The Art of Fermentation