June 21, 2025 • 32 mins
Vinegar can balance or amplify other flavors—it can cut through fat, enhance sweetness, and brighten dull dishes. Its acidity kills bacteria, making it a natural preservative long before refrigeration. Brighten Up Salads! Mix olive oil, balsamic or red wine vinegar, mustard, and honey to create a classic vinaigrette. Try rice vinegar in Asian-style salads with sesame oil and soy sauce. Vinegar tenderizes the meat and infuses flavor. Balsamic vinegar + strawberries + a touch of black pepper = an unexpectedly delightful dessert.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, it's Nil Sevadra. You're listening to kfi EM six
forty the four Report on demand on the iHeartRadio app.
Do you do? Thanks for hanging out with us today.
We'll have three hours to discuss food, what's going on,
food culture and things like that. We're going to start
with Technique of the Week. And I don't know that
(00:20):
we've done this. If we have, it's been a long time.
I'm sure we've touched on vinegar before, but I want
to get into vinegar a little more of a deep dive.
So I thought it would be a great start to
the program today with Technique of the Week. There's a
book if you don't have it, I would highly recommend
it came out and I don't know twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen,
(00:43):
something like that. Some in Nosrat, I think is how
you pronounce her name wrote a brilliant book breaking down
cooking into four essentials. Salt, fat, acid, heat. That's actually
the name of the book, And really these are things.
(01:03):
The salt is a salt is a taste, but it
also has a chemical reaction to it as well. But
salt is the only thing salty on Earth I know, right,
sounds like well, of course it would be. But keep
in mind it is one of your tastes, salt, and
(01:26):
it can only come from salt. For instance, fat comes
from many different places. Acid can come from different places
as well, and heat there's different types of heat. But
salt is salt is salt. But I love this book
because it breaks down the fundamentals of cooking in a beautiful,
(01:48):
beautiful way. And I'll use some analogies when I can
think of it this way, because I work with photography,
and I work with graphics and have for many, many years,
and one of the things that you use in good
photography is contrast. Now, any illustration or design is going
to use contrast. You want depth, you want focus, you
(02:10):
want lights and dark and all of these things. And
strangely enough, that's the same thing you want in cooking.
And acid is one of those things that's going to
bring out. It's going to brighten food, it's going to
cause contrast. When something looks kind of hazy. I know
(02:31):
it's kind of a hazy day today, it's supposed to
burn off. Of course, this is the first official full
day of summer, and there's something when it's gray or
there's no real shadows. Everything kind of looks bland out right. Well,
imagine when the sun comes out and you have very
(02:52):
striking or harsh shadows. It also doesn't only create that
contrast of dark and light, but note that once the
gray burns off today, that you're gonna see more vibrancy
in the colors. Those red umbrellas you have in the backyard,
or the blues of a of a T shirt or
dress or whatever, They're gonna become more vibrant. That's kind
(03:14):
of what acid does as well. It's like the sun
shining on things. It just makes something flat become bright
and wonderful. There have been times where I would make something,
you know, like a vegetable dish or something, or maybe
a stew, and I taste it and the salt the
(03:36):
seasoning tastes right, and everything kind of tastes right, but
to me, it's like bland. You know, it just is bland.
And then all of a sudden, I think I'm gonna
pop some acid in there. And acid comes from vinegar,
(03:56):
acid can come from citrus, acid can come now naturally,
and things like tomatoes and the like. But this I
need a pop. I'll reach for vinegar, and each vinegar
has a a flavor base and and differences about it
that create another level to your palate. And so yes,
(04:22):
it can brighten, it can create contrast, but it balances
things out. Salt makes things taste more like themselves. Shouldn't
be salty. Salt should awaken your taste, but buds to
taste whatever your uh, you know, enjoying. So if it's meat,
(04:45):
that meat should taste more lammy, if it's lamb, more beefy,
if it's beef, more poultry, if it's poultry. Acid is
going to balance those flavors out. The harmony is like
a filter that brings everything together, makes them all sound
(05:07):
like themselves, but in a symphony of flavor that they
kind of have their individuality but doing it all together.
So the most versatile sources of acid gonna be vinegar.
Like I said about things like tomatoes or citrus, They're
going to add other things to the base as well
(05:27):
that maybe you don't want. But vinegar you can find
in different notes, in different variants, but they're going to
come together. It's very available to those of us who
are home cooks, and some are a little more rare
than others, but they all have their own flavors and
(05:48):
uses if you can ever find them. One of the
best places to do it, and I know are beloved
bomb Fass that was out there in Claremont is no
longer there, but the Ventura San Diego you can still
find them. Go and taste to a tasting of vinegars
and you'll be surprised that different types of flavors that
(06:10):
each one can bring. And there's many others. You look
around town that we have a lot of great olive
oil and vinegar places throughout the south Land, and you
kind of have to know the taste of these things
to be able to choose the right vinegar for you
know whether you're gonna pickle something, whether you're going to
do a pan sauce or a reduction of some kind.
(06:34):
So the key there is to be able to understand
the notes and what each will bring. Now, to make vinegar,
you only need a few things. It's very basic. You
need alcohol, you need heat, you need oxygen, and you
(06:54):
put these things together. And in that too, you're going
to add a natural bacteria that kind of converts the
alcohol to acid in the first place. So vinegar traditionally
made from alcoholic beverages. And these are things that we drink,
whether it's a hard cider, a sake, a wine, a beer.
These are the things that vinegars are going to be
made out of. If you've ever you know, left the
(07:17):
bottle of red wine out or something like that begins
to sour, it's basically on its way to becoming vinegar.
Not a good vinegar, but a vinegar, all right. So
American vinegar is you know, just like any other place.
You can get a varietys of them. You can find
(07:38):
your white distilled vinegar. These things like white distilled vinegar
I used to clean things as well as to brighten
up food. It's kind of the acidity in it is
at a place where you can use it to clean
and get like tarnish off or what am I thinking of? Oh,
(08:01):
you know, on your sink or something. If you have
mineral build up on your faucet or something like that,
you can use distilled vinegar, some vinegars might say diluted.
Other things in there could be manufactured for distributed. To
buy these things doesn't mean they're bad products. It just
means that the brand you're buying from probably didn't make
(08:23):
it themselves. They're taking different parts of the vinegar and
putting them together. If you're looking for different types of vinegars,
there's about ten basic categories, and the first one is
the one that you probably have in your pantry right now,
and that's white vinegar or distilled vinegar, very simple variety.
(08:47):
It's always almost always made industrially. It's made from distilled alcohol,
and generally you take super high proof alcohol, and this
is an alcohol that hasn't you know, hasn't spent time
(09:08):
in a barrel or anything like that to bring up
any of its flavor. Using industrial fermentation methods, and it
turns into a high acid vinegar which then you dilute
down and you probably bring it down to normally somewhere
around five percent acidity. And the value to all this,
I guess, is that it's made with neutral spirits, so
(09:30):
it doesn't have any flavor per se that's going to
affect your dish. So stilled vinegar can be used in
tons of different ways. Can make cakes lighter, believe it
or not, helping set whites in poached eggs. It's one
of those things that you heard you put that in
the boiling water and it helps kind of firm up
(09:55):
the albumine, the whites of the eggs. Very reliable thing
that you can use whose canned pickles, super affordable. You
can buy it in large containers and it doesn't affect
the color of the vegetable, you know, because it's just clear.
(10:15):
It's safe for canning. All these things make it kind
of this household, bright, crisp neutral. People use it for
pickled eggs, Jimmy churry, raspberry vinaigrette, these types of things.
The next you look at are going to get into
(10:36):
more flavors that are going to be usable. And the
first one we're going to look at is apple cider
vinegar and we'll talk more about that we come back.
Speaker 2 (10:45):
You're listening to the Fork Report with Nil Savedra on
demand from KFI AM six forty.
Speaker 1 (10:52):
We're talking. We started the Fork Report today with our
technique of the week talking about vinegars. This acid is
oneful thing, acid that brightens and causes contrast in your dish.
And what a great day to talk about it when
it's hazy out, because go look outside the lack of contrast.
How everything's kind of one note, even bright colors are
(11:14):
a little flat. Well, that's the type of thing. When
you taste a dish and it tastes like that, that
is exactly when you need to brighten it up with
vinegar with an acid to give it that extra pop
that just separates every single note into something more beautiful.
We talked about your basic vinegar that you have, your
(11:36):
white vinegar, your distilled vinegar that you have. I guarantee
you use it for cleaning and also for cooking. The
next we were just starting to talk about apple cider vinegar.
It's made traditionally from a hard cider, alcoholic cider. It
offers an acidity from five to six percent, still in
the same or similar range as the white or distilled,
(12:00):
but it does have this apple forward, fruity taste and
that adds just a wonderful pack to what they call
quick pickling or quick pickles, salad dressing, for marinades, these
types of things. It works out. It's also very good
(12:21):
for just giving that extra punch. But unlike the the
distilled vinegar that is neutral, it just did I don't know,
vinegary taste. You can add, you know, mix apple cide
or vinegar, ginger water, something sweet like you know, maple
(12:42):
syrup or molasses, and some people would use that to drink.
There are actually drinking vinegars out there that I used
to drink vinegar. There were some great Again, you have
to find a store that has them in stock. I mean,
some people drink at apple cider vinegar, but that's slightly
(13:05):
different than something that has been created for drinking. And again,
back in the days when we had our partners, sponsors
and friends there at vom Foss and Claremont, they have
so many that are worthy of drinking on their own.
And of course you could still find vom Fass in
(13:28):
Ventura and in San Diego and the like. And they
were friends of our friend Kim in Claremont, so you
know that they're good people as well. But you can
do tastings of their vinegars and they're just fantastic. So
it depends what you're doing with it. Again, the acidity
(13:53):
can go up to six percent, a little bit more
than your distilled vinegar. And then there's rice vinegar. I
love rice vinegar. This is used in Asian food and
it just there is a sort of sweetness about it
and something that is distinctive to me that just makes
a dish pop. So obviously made traditionally from rice wine
(14:18):
or suke white rice vinegar is the least acidic. So
we've talked about five percent, talk about six percent. This
goes about four to five percent. It's mild, it's got
a new mommy ness, a very a savoriness to it,
but it is just lovely hot or sour. Sauce goes
(14:44):
well with and it just is I just there's something
about that flavor to me that just works really well.
I like it with carrots, like it with a bunch
of things. Sherry vinegar. So if you know on the
sense of rice vinegar you look at it as being
more mildly acidic, then sherry vinegar is made from fortified
(15:08):
wine and it's on the other end of the spectrum.
So it's going from about six to eight percent acid.
So this is when you're going to put it towards
tenderizing meat, red meat. It's going to do a great job.
Keep in mind, it is a dark vinegar, so if
you did use it on poultry or fish or something
(15:30):
like that, it's definitely going to transfer that color there,
which may or may not be appetizing. Has a little
bit of nuttiness to it, but can be really wonderful
and can brighten up all kinds of dishes. There. Okay,
there's some more that I want to get into as well,
So stick around and we'll continue talking about technique of
(15:51):
the week. And this technique is really kind of breaking
down the acid we find in vinegar. It's just a
lovely ingredy it that a lot of us home cooks. Well,
I'll speak for myself. Took me a while and continues
to take me a while to really understand. It's like
seasoning or anything else. It really is trial and error
(16:13):
and understanding when you need that acid maybe to cut
through some of the fattiness, or to separate flavors, brighten flavors,
or just elevate a dish, and you'd be surprised. A
tiny little capful and a big pot of something can
really cause separation and contrast that will make the dish
(16:33):
go pow. So stick around. Much more to come.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
You're listening to the Fork Report with Nil Sevadra on
demand from KFI A six.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
For I heard here every Saturday. I produced The Jesus
Show tomorrow at six am, and then I'm with you
Monday through Friday, hanging out with Bill Handle in the
morning crew and an Amy and Cono and Will and
the whole gang there. So I'm always happy to do that.
That'd be sick of me. That's a lot of me,
(17:03):
My poor wife. Don't say anything, o, Kayla, I know
what you're thinking. All right, Back to vinegar. I'm extending
this because vinegar is one of those things that is
imperative to good home cooking, good cooking period. And so
for Technique of the Week, I thought i'd go through these,
going through the ten, the ten big ones that you
(17:25):
need to know about and that you can use. Acidity
is important to the way brightens flavor, causes contrast, and
adds it adds that jouje when something just seems flat,
And what a day to talk about it with it
being a hazy June day. You look out and that's
(17:45):
kind of like in photography or the way we see
things and how they can kind of look flat. You
don't have shadows, and sometimes that's what you want when
you're taking doing photography, but in a case like this,
there's no vibrancy to the colors and things like that.
Well that's kind of what acid brings to it is
(18:06):
like what light brings to photography, brighten things up causes contrast,
and that's what we need in our food sometimes. So
white wine vinegar vinegars that you know, wine vinegars tend
to be kind of the middle of the road when
it comes to the acidity, so they kind of stay
(18:29):
around that five percent mark, right, and that makes them versatile.
That makes them have a lot of play in what
you can do with them and how you use them.
I have fortified wines like Lily Blanc that I will
use in cocktails, and fortified wines obviously go back into
(18:51):
the refrigerator once they're opened. You don't leave them out,
and they do go bad, whereas a vinegar is going
to have higher acid and it's going to stay more
stable for longer periods of time. But I'll do that
when when I'm doing a dish and vegetables and I'm
like there's just something lacking, I'll take a fortified wine
(19:13):
like Lile Blanc and that I use for mixing a
cocktail or something, and I'll just pour a little bit
of that in there. But when you want the super
versatility of something in the middle row the wine vinegars,
in this case, white wine vinegar ends up being really great.
It's easily found at the grocery store. But you can find,
(19:35):
you know, different varieties as well. You can find a
chardonnay looking at looking at you fair and a pinot.
You've got champagne, other grapes, regions, whatever, They're going to
add their own flavors and that are going to add
to the acidity as well. So it depends on what
(19:57):
you're cooking, but you can use champagne vinegar as a
base ingredient in a barbecue marinade, believe it or not,
an adobo, things like that. Many chefs in an article
I was reading or breaking down these different styles of
the use of vinegars and when they use them, and
(20:18):
it really it really goes to show you how we're
still these things are having these Food and Wine did
a wonderful breakdown on vinegars, which is where I was
pulling a lot of information from just great great content.
A white vinegar is good for chicken breast. Like I said,
(20:39):
the color of the vinegar could change the color of
the meat depending on how you're using it. And sometimes
a red wine might look great with the chicken that
you're doing, and it causes this richness and this great
color to it. However, sometimes it may cause a color
that is unfavorable because it just looks muddied or grayish
(21:01):
or something like that. So when you're using it in
poultry or fish, the white is light, so it adds.
It's not as jarring on an off putting as it
can be acidity, Like I said, about five percent mild balanced.
(21:22):
You can use it for all kinds of things, candy, bacon, wedge, salad.
Red wine vinegar is going to play in that similar
pool generic blended versions of highly specific specific wine red wine,
like you can get a cab or you can get
a Pinot Noah or something like that, and it makes
(21:45):
its red wine vinegar, you know, sit in that same
category about five percent acidity. You can get a California Surrah.
All these different things are going to bring slightly different
flavors to the table, but the app acid is still
going to be doing what it's doing. Some people even
use red wine vinegar as a bitter or something in
(22:08):
their cocktails. It could be as high as seven percent,
but it's usually floating around the five percent range. Tangy
sometimes fruity can add a lot to it. Now one
that I love because this can fall into sweet and
savory depending on its thickness and flavorings and things like that.
(22:30):
But a balsamic vinegar, and I know there's many of you,
and I've heard from you before that you do not
like balsamic vinegar. I absolutely adore it, and I keep
a number of different types here. A maletti is one
of the ones that I absolutely love, and again that
came from our friends at voon Fass, And to me,
(22:52):
it is gold. It is absolute liquid gold. I put
it on top of, you know, if I'm making an
avocado toast or something, or you can even put it
on top of vanilla ice cream. It's so sweet and
lovely up against that, so it's deep, it's rich. I'll
use it to do reductions, all kinds of great things.
(23:16):
It really has to do with the percentages of sugars
over the alcohol. That's what kind of breaks it down.
They just really cook it down and concentrate those sugars
and it just gives it that sweetness to it. Sometimes
it's aged in barrels, or it's always aged in barrels,
(23:37):
but sometimes it's aged for much longer. But it's got
to have a minimum of twelve years, and just the
flavors of it in a gosh. I love it with
red meat, I love it on salads. There's so much
that you can do with it, and it really is
(23:57):
one of those wonderful, wonderful things. All Right, we'll wrap
this up vinegars when we come back, So go know
where you've been listening to the fore Report. You can
always hear us live on KFI AM six forty two
to five pm on Saturday and anytime on demand on
the iHeartRadio appum chatting with you on look At, I said, chatting.
(24:21):
I'm comfortable with who I am chatting with you on
a Saturday, as we are one to do on the
fore Report, hanging out and celebrating food in every way
kind of an extended technique of the week as we're
talking about the ten top vinegar types. Vinegar is incredibly
important to cooking and separating flavors, brightening things up, causing contrast,
(24:47):
and it is a wonderful thing. Indeed, we're moving on
from balsamic vinegar, which I know a lot of people
have different opinions about. I really love it. The sweetness,
a bit of tangyness, tends to be pretty rich. I
think it goes great on pork chops and the light
I like to put it. I like to grill watermelon
during the summer and a little salt and pepper on there,
(25:09):
and you can grill it and then you just rizzle
a nice high end bolsamic vinegar on that. Get it
with a fork, You're welcome. Malt vinegar malt vinegar is
made traditionally with beer, and it can be slightly sweet.
It's kind of toasty, little nutty typically or just medium
(25:30):
plus let's say, with acidity going five percent six percent.
And there are two types. Well, there's many types out there,
but some make them from ipa, one from a porter
style beer, and they can be you know, made from
(25:51):
an industrial malt mash uh. And those things aren't made
for eating, but you can process us the vinegar and
make them a wonderful treat for you. Subtle in flavor,
maybe not something you'd want to drink, but as it
(26:11):
is used, it gets a little sweet. It can be
complex depending people will use it on a beer battered fish.
That malt vinegar a only things like that, maybe a
spicy beer mustard. And then that moves us to black vinegar.
Black vinegar is put into creation by way of fermentation
(26:38):
just like the other vinegars, but it's fermenting whole grains,
so you're using barley or sticky rice or things like that,
very umami, and it just has this pretty intense flavor, malty,
rich and very flavor or fall So you can do it,
(27:02):
use it as a dipping sauce for dumplings and the like.
It originated in China, works very good with Asian cuisines,
whether it's Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese, works very very well. Honey vinegar,
now this is maybe something that might be harder to
get depending on where you are. It's made from mead,
(27:25):
and this honey vinegar is you know, it's not everywhere.
It depends where you're shopping, but it has a similar
process than the other vinegar or things like that. You
ferment it slowly let age. In this case it's whiskey barrels.
It mellows out the vinegar. Use honey vinegar like you
(27:49):
would a white balsamic, so it's naturally sweet. Brighten up
butter cream, add tang to fruit cobbler, caramelized onion jam,
kind of jug it up and kick it up a notch.
And it's from low to mid so it goes between
like four and five percent acidity, very sweet, floral. You
(28:14):
can use it in a braize chicken, that type of things.
So this breaks down the most basic kind of varieties
of vinegar. But again, think about the whole dish, the contrast,
the taking us back to the concept of photography or
(28:36):
art or design and how if something is monotonous and
it seems flat and there's no contrast or no depth
or these types of things, that often when you find
that in a dish, that often is the lack of acidity.
You're missing something to cause a vibrancy to the dullness
(29:01):
of a dish. And you could have done everything else right.
The fatten air is perfect, the heat, the temp that
you're cooking is perfect. All of those things come together well.
But what you're missing is going to be the lovely,
separating and dynamic ingredient of acid. That acid can come
(29:25):
from different places. Even buttermilk has acid in it. That's
what causes That's what causes it to become acidic and
to get that tanginess that it gets in buttermilk, and
you can use That's why many people when they're making
a fried chicken will let it marinate overnight in buttermilk
(29:47):
because that acidity, so it has functional properties like chemical reactions,
but also the way it dances on your tongue or
wakes up your taste buds in a way for you
to be able to taste the different things in a
dish in a way that brightens them and causes that contrast.
(30:10):
So it's one of those ingredients that I think many
of us will you know, make mistakes with or tend
not to put in a dish properly, or you know,
leave it out. We're afraid that it's going to mess
the dish up. Well, like any ingredient, you can mess
a dish up by putting far too much of it
(30:31):
in there. But the reality is, just like salt or
any other seasoning or fat, that you're going to have
to learn the proportions to be able to utilize it
in a way that makes everything wonderful and delicious. That's
the key of cooking, right. Controlling liquid, controlling temperature, all
(30:55):
these things are part of the experience of making a
dish at home. And so in this particular case, it's
the acid to focus on. And so I hope that
you take some of these ideas, and if you didn't
get to hear the whole thing, you can go back
and listen to the podcast of course at KFIAM six
forty dot com. But play around with it. Even if
you set aside a bowl of something if you're cooking,
(31:16):
you don't want to do it in the whole bowl.
You want to set it aside. Just keep in mind
that a little goes a long way when it comes
to acid, and the way it wakes up a dish
is always it always surprises me how just a tiny
little bit of in this case vinegar or something will
brighten up a dish, a vegetable dish or something and
(31:39):
make it taste cleaner and brighter. So I hope that
that helps and gets you focused on trying something new
if you are not comfortable with it, and there is
much more to come, so go nowhere.
Speaker 2 (31:54):
You're listening to the Fork Report with Nil Savedra on
demand from KFI AM six foard
Hey, it's Nil Sevadra. You're listening to kfi EM six
forty the four Report on demand on the iHeartRadio app.
Do you do? Thanks for hanging out with us today.
We'll have three hours to discuss food, what's going on,
food culture and things like that. We're going to start
with Technique of the Week. And I don't know that
(00:20):
we've done this. If we have, it's been a long time.
I'm sure we've touched on vinegar before, but I want
to get into vinegar a little more of a deep dive.
So I thought it would be a great start to
the program today with Technique of the Week. There's a
book if you don't have it, I would highly recommend
it came out and I don't know twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen,
(00:43):
something like that. Some in Nosrat, I think is how
you pronounce her name wrote a brilliant book breaking down
cooking into four essentials. Salt, fat, acid, heat. That's actually
the name of the book, And really these are things.
(01:03):
The salt is a salt is a taste, but it
also has a chemical reaction to it as well. But
salt is the only thing salty on Earth I know, right,
sounds like well, of course it would be. But keep
in mind it is one of your tastes, salt, and
(01:26):
it can only come from salt. For instance, fat comes
from many different places. Acid can come from different places
as well, and heat there's different types of heat. But
salt is salt is salt. But I love this book
because it breaks down the fundamentals of cooking in a beautiful,
(01:48):
beautiful way. And I'll use some analogies when I can
think of it this way, because I work with photography,
and I work with graphics and have for many, many years,
and one of the things that you use in good
photography is contrast. Now, any illustration or design is going
to use contrast. You want depth, you want focus, you
(02:10):
want lights and dark and all of these things. And
strangely enough, that's the same thing you want in cooking.
And acid is one of those things that's going to
bring out. It's going to brighten food, it's going to
cause contrast. When something looks kind of hazy. I know
(02:31):
it's kind of a hazy day today, it's supposed to
burn off. Of course, this is the first official full
day of summer, and there's something when it's gray or
there's no real shadows. Everything kind of looks bland out right. Well,
imagine when the sun comes out and you have very
(02:52):
striking or harsh shadows. It also doesn't only create that
contrast of dark and light, but note that once the
gray burns off today, that you're gonna see more vibrancy
in the colors. Those red umbrellas you have in the backyard,
or the blues of a of a T shirt or
dress or whatever, They're gonna become more vibrant. That's kind
(03:14):
of what acid does as well. It's like the sun
shining on things. It just makes something flat become bright
and wonderful. There have been times where I would make something,
you know, like a vegetable dish or something, or maybe
a stew, and I taste it and the salt the
(03:36):
seasoning tastes right, and everything kind of tastes right, but
to me, it's like bland. You know, it just is bland.
And then all of a sudden, I think I'm gonna
pop some acid in there. And acid comes from vinegar,
(03:56):
acid can come from citrus, acid can come now naturally,
and things like tomatoes and the like. But this I
need a pop. I'll reach for vinegar, and each vinegar
has a a flavor base and and differences about it
that create another level to your palate. And so yes,
(04:22):
it can brighten, it can create contrast, but it balances
things out. Salt makes things taste more like themselves. Shouldn't
be salty. Salt should awaken your taste, but buds to
taste whatever your uh, you know, enjoying. So if it's meat,
(04:45):
that meat should taste more lammy, if it's lamb, more beefy,
if it's beef, more poultry, if it's poultry. Acid is
going to balance those flavors out. The harmony is like
a filter that brings everything together, makes them all sound
(05:07):
like themselves, but in a symphony of flavor that they
kind of have their individuality but doing it all together.
So the most versatile sources of acid gonna be vinegar.
Like I said about things like tomatoes or citrus, They're
going to add other things to the base as well
(05:27):
that maybe you don't want. But vinegar you can find
in different notes, in different variants, but they're going to
come together. It's very available to those of us who
are home cooks, and some are a little more rare
than others, but they all have their own flavors and
(05:48):
uses if you can ever find them. One of the
best places to do it, and I know are beloved
bomb Fass that was out there in Claremont is no
longer there, but the Ventura San Diego you can still
find them. Go and taste to a tasting of vinegars
and you'll be surprised that different types of flavors that
(06:10):
each one can bring. And there's many others. You look
around town that we have a lot of great olive
oil and vinegar places throughout the south Land, and you
kind of have to know the taste of these things
to be able to choose the right vinegar for you
know whether you're gonna pickle something, whether you're going to
do a pan sauce or a reduction of some kind.
(06:34):
So the key there is to be able to understand
the notes and what each will bring. Now, to make vinegar,
you only need a few things. It's very basic. You
need alcohol, you need heat, you need oxygen, and you
(06:54):
put these things together. And in that too, you're going
to add a natural bacteria that kind of converts the
alcohol to acid in the first place. So vinegar traditionally
made from alcoholic beverages. And these are things that we drink,
whether it's a hard cider, a sake, a wine, a beer.
These are the things that vinegars are going to be
made out of. If you've ever you know, left the
(07:17):
bottle of red wine out or something like that begins
to sour, it's basically on its way to becoming vinegar.
Not a good vinegar, but a vinegar, all right. So
American vinegar is you know, just like any other place.
You can get a varietys of them. You can find
(07:38):
your white distilled vinegar. These things like white distilled vinegar
I used to clean things as well as to brighten
up food. It's kind of the acidity in it is
at a place where you can use it to clean
and get like tarnish off or what am I thinking of? Oh,
(08:01):
you know, on your sink or something. If you have
mineral build up on your faucet or something like that,
you can use distilled vinegar, some vinegars might say diluted.
Other things in there could be manufactured for distributed. To
buy these things doesn't mean they're bad products. It just
means that the brand you're buying from probably didn't make
(08:23):
it themselves. They're taking different parts of the vinegar and
putting them together. If you're looking for different types of vinegars,
there's about ten basic categories, and the first one is
the one that you probably have in your pantry right now,
and that's white vinegar or distilled vinegar, very simple variety.
(08:47):
It's always almost always made industrially. It's made from distilled alcohol,
and generally you take super high proof alcohol, and this
is an alcohol that hasn't you know, hasn't spent time
(09:08):
in a barrel or anything like that to bring up
any of its flavor. Using industrial fermentation methods, and it
turns into a high acid vinegar which then you dilute
down and you probably bring it down to normally somewhere
around five percent acidity. And the value to all this,
I guess, is that it's made with neutral spirits, so
(09:30):
it doesn't have any flavor per se that's going to
affect your dish. So stilled vinegar can be used in
tons of different ways. Can make cakes lighter, believe it
or not, helping set whites in poached eggs. It's one
of those things that you heard you put that in
the boiling water and it helps kind of firm up
(09:55):
the albumine, the whites of the eggs. Very reliable thing
that you can use whose canned pickles, super affordable. You
can buy it in large containers and it doesn't affect
the color of the vegetable, you know, because it's just clear.
(10:15):
It's safe for canning. All these things make it kind
of this household, bright, crisp neutral. People use it for
pickled eggs, Jimmy churry, raspberry vinaigrette, these types of things.
The next you look at are going to get into
(10:36):
more flavors that are going to be usable. And the
first one we're going to look at is apple cider
vinegar and we'll talk more about that we come back.
Speaker 2 (10:45):
You're listening to the Fork Report with Nil Savedra on
demand from KFI AM six forty.
Speaker 1 (10:52):
We're talking. We started the Fork Report today with our
technique of the week talking about vinegars. This acid is
oneful thing, acid that brightens and causes contrast in your dish.
And what a great day to talk about it when
it's hazy out, because go look outside the lack of contrast.
How everything's kind of one note, even bright colors are
(11:14):
a little flat. Well, that's the type of thing. When
you taste a dish and it tastes like that, that
is exactly when you need to brighten it up with
vinegar with an acid to give it that extra pop
that just separates every single note into something more beautiful.
We talked about your basic vinegar that you have, your
(11:36):
white vinegar, your distilled vinegar that you have. I guarantee
you use it for cleaning and also for cooking. The
next we were just starting to talk about apple cider vinegar.
It's made traditionally from a hard cider, alcoholic cider. It
offers an acidity from five to six percent, still in
the same or similar range as the white or distilled,
(12:00):
but it does have this apple forward, fruity taste and
that adds just a wonderful pack to what they call
quick pickling or quick pickles, salad dressing, for marinades, these
types of things. It works out. It's also very good
(12:21):
for just giving that extra punch. But unlike the the
distilled vinegar that is neutral, it just did I don't know,
vinegary taste. You can add, you know, mix apple cide
or vinegar, ginger water, something sweet like you know, maple
(12:42):
syrup or molasses, and some people would use that to drink.
There are actually drinking vinegars out there that I used
to drink vinegar. There were some great Again, you have
to find a store that has them in stock. I mean,
some people drink at apple cider vinegar, but that's slightly
(13:05):
different than something that has been created for drinking. And again,
back in the days when we had our partners, sponsors
and friends there at vom Foss and Claremont, they have
so many that are worthy of drinking on their own.
And of course you could still find vom Fass in
(13:28):
Ventura and in San Diego and the like. And they
were friends of our friend Kim in Claremont, so you
know that they're good people as well. But you can
do tastings of their vinegars and they're just fantastic. So
it depends what you're doing with it. Again, the acidity
(13:53):
can go up to six percent, a little bit more
than your distilled vinegar. And then there's rice vinegar. I
love rice vinegar. This is used in Asian food and
it just there is a sort of sweetness about it
and something that is distinctive to me that just makes
a dish pop. So obviously made traditionally from rice wine
(14:18):
or suke white rice vinegar is the least acidic. So
we've talked about five percent, talk about six percent. This
goes about four to five percent. It's mild, it's got
a new mommy ness, a very a savoriness to it,
but it is just lovely hot or sour. Sauce goes
(14:44):
well with and it just is I just there's something
about that flavor to me that just works really well.
I like it with carrots, like it with a bunch
of things. Sherry vinegar. So if you know on the
sense of rice vinegar you look at it as being
more mildly acidic, then sherry vinegar is made from fortified
(15:08):
wine and it's on the other end of the spectrum.
So it's going from about six to eight percent acid.
So this is when you're going to put it towards
tenderizing meat, red meat. It's going to do a great job.
Keep in mind, it is a dark vinegar, so if
you did use it on poultry or fish or something
(15:30):
like that, it's definitely going to transfer that color there,
which may or may not be appetizing. Has a little
bit of nuttiness to it, but can be really wonderful
and can brighten up all kinds of dishes. There. Okay,
there's some more that I want to get into as well,
So stick around and we'll continue talking about technique of
(15:51):
the week. And this technique is really kind of breaking
down the acid we find in vinegar. It's just a
lovely ingredy it that a lot of us home cooks. Well,
I'll speak for myself. Took me a while and continues
to take me a while to really understand. It's like
seasoning or anything else. It really is trial and error
(16:13):
and understanding when you need that acid maybe to cut
through some of the fattiness, or to separate flavors, brighten flavors,
or just elevate a dish, and you'd be surprised. A
tiny little capful and a big pot of something can
really cause separation and contrast that will make the dish
(16:33):
go pow. So stick around. Much more to come.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
You're listening to the Fork Report with Nil Sevadra on
demand from KFI A six.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
For I heard here every Saturday. I produced The Jesus
Show tomorrow at six am, and then I'm with you
Monday through Friday, hanging out with Bill Handle in the
morning crew and an Amy and Cono and Will and
the whole gang there. So I'm always happy to do that.
That'd be sick of me. That's a lot of me,
(17:03):
My poor wife. Don't say anything, o, Kayla, I know
what you're thinking. All right, Back to vinegar. I'm extending
this because vinegar is one of those things that is
imperative to good home cooking, good cooking period. And so
for Technique of the Week, I thought i'd go through these,
going through the ten, the ten big ones that you
(17:25):
need to know about and that you can use. Acidity
is important to the way brightens flavor, causes contrast, and
adds it adds that jouje when something just seems flat,
And what a day to talk about it with it
being a hazy June day. You look out and that's
(17:45):
kind of like in photography or the way we see
things and how they can kind of look flat. You
don't have shadows, and sometimes that's what you want when
you're taking doing photography, but in a case like this,
there's no vibrancy to the colors and things like that.
Well that's kind of what acid brings to it is
(18:06):
like what light brings to photography, brighten things up causes contrast,
and that's what we need in our food sometimes. So
white wine vinegar vinegars that you know, wine vinegars tend
to be kind of the middle of the road when
it comes to the acidity, so they kind of stay
(18:29):
around that five percent mark, right, and that makes them versatile.
That makes them have a lot of play in what
you can do with them and how you use them.
I have fortified wines like Lily Blanc that I will
use in cocktails, and fortified wines obviously go back into
(18:51):
the refrigerator once they're opened. You don't leave them out,
and they do go bad, whereas a vinegar is going
to have higher acid and it's going to stay more
stable for longer periods of time. But I'll do that
when when I'm doing a dish and vegetables and I'm
like there's just something lacking, I'll take a fortified wine
(19:13):
like Lile Blanc and that I use for mixing a
cocktail or something, and I'll just pour a little bit
of that in there. But when you want the super
versatility of something in the middle row the wine vinegars,
in this case, white wine vinegar ends up being really great.
It's easily found at the grocery store. But you can find,
(19:35):
you know, different varieties as well. You can find a
chardonnay looking at looking at you fair and a pinot.
You've got champagne, other grapes, regions, whatever, They're going to
add their own flavors and that are going to add
to the acidity as well. So it depends on what
(19:57):
you're cooking, but you can use champagne vinegar as a
base ingredient in a barbecue marinade, believe it or not,
an adobo, things like that. Many chefs in an article
I was reading or breaking down these different styles of
the use of vinegars and when they use them, and
(20:18):
it really it really goes to show you how we're
still these things are having these Food and Wine did
a wonderful breakdown on vinegars, which is where I was
pulling a lot of information from just great great content.
A white vinegar is good for chicken breast. Like I said,
(20:39):
the color of the vinegar could change the color of
the meat depending on how you're using it. And sometimes
a red wine might look great with the chicken that
you're doing, and it causes this richness and this great
color to it. However, sometimes it may cause a color
that is unfavorable because it just looks muddied or grayish
(21:01):
or something like that. So when you're using it in
poultry or fish, the white is light, so it adds.
It's not as jarring on an off putting as it
can be acidity, Like I said, about five percent mild balanced.
(21:22):
You can use it for all kinds of things, candy, bacon, wedge, salad.
Red wine vinegar is going to play in that similar
pool generic blended versions of highly specific specific wine red wine,
like you can get a cab or you can get
a Pinot Noah or something like that, and it makes
(21:45):
its red wine vinegar, you know, sit in that same
category about five percent acidity. You can get a California Surrah.
All these different things are going to bring slightly different
flavors to the table, but the app acid is still
going to be doing what it's doing. Some people even
use red wine vinegar as a bitter or something in
(22:08):
their cocktails. It could be as high as seven percent,
but it's usually floating around the five percent range. Tangy
sometimes fruity can add a lot to it. Now one
that I love because this can fall into sweet and
savory depending on its thickness and flavorings and things like that.
(22:30):
But a balsamic vinegar, and I know there's many of you,
and I've heard from you before that you do not
like balsamic vinegar. I absolutely adore it, and I keep
a number of different types here. A maletti is one
of the ones that I absolutely love, and again that
came from our friends at voon Fass, And to me,
(22:52):
it is gold. It is absolute liquid gold. I put
it on top of, you know, if I'm making an
avocado toast or something, or you can even put it
on top of vanilla ice cream. It's so sweet and
lovely up against that, so it's deep, it's rich. I'll
use it to do reductions, all kinds of great things.
(23:16):
It really has to do with the percentages of sugars
over the alcohol. That's what kind of breaks it down.
They just really cook it down and concentrate those sugars
and it just gives it that sweetness to it. Sometimes
it's aged in barrels, or it's always aged in barrels,
(23:37):
but sometimes it's aged for much longer. But it's got
to have a minimum of twelve years, and just the
flavors of it in a gosh. I love it with
red meat, I love it on salads. There's so much
that you can do with it, and it really is
(23:57):
one of those wonderful, wonderful things. All Right, we'll wrap
this up vinegars when we come back, So go know
where you've been listening to the fore Report. You can
always hear us live on KFI AM six forty two
to five pm on Saturday and anytime on demand on
the iHeartRadio appum chatting with you on look At, I said, chatting.
(24:21):
I'm comfortable with who I am chatting with you on
a Saturday, as we are one to do on the
fore Report, hanging out and celebrating food in every way
kind of an extended technique of the week as we're
talking about the ten top vinegar types. Vinegar is incredibly
important to cooking and separating flavors, brightening things up, causing contrast,
(24:47):
and it is a wonderful thing. Indeed, we're moving on
from balsamic vinegar, which I know a lot of people
have different opinions about. I really love it. The sweetness,
a bit of tangyness, tends to be pretty rich. I
think it goes great on pork chops and the light
I like to put it. I like to grill watermelon
during the summer and a little salt and pepper on there,
(25:09):
and you can grill it and then you just rizzle
a nice high end bolsamic vinegar on that. Get it
with a fork, You're welcome. Malt vinegar malt vinegar is
made traditionally with beer, and it can be slightly sweet.
It's kind of toasty, little nutty typically or just medium
(25:30):
plus let's say, with acidity going five percent six percent.
And there are two types. Well, there's many types out there,
but some make them from ipa, one from a porter
style beer, and they can be you know, made from
(25:51):
an industrial malt mash uh. And those things aren't made
for eating, but you can process us the vinegar and
make them a wonderful treat for you. Subtle in flavor,
maybe not something you'd want to drink, but as it
(26:11):
is used, it gets a little sweet. It can be
complex depending people will use it on a beer battered fish.
That malt vinegar a only things like that, maybe a
spicy beer mustard. And then that moves us to black vinegar.
Black vinegar is put into creation by way of fermentation
(26:38):
just like the other vinegars, but it's fermenting whole grains,
so you're using barley or sticky rice or things like that,
very umami, and it just has this pretty intense flavor, malty,
rich and very flavor or fall So you can do it,
(27:02):
use it as a dipping sauce for dumplings and the like.
It originated in China, works very good with Asian cuisines,
whether it's Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese, works very very well. Honey vinegar,
now this is maybe something that might be harder to
get depending on where you are. It's made from mead,
(27:25):
and this honey vinegar is you know, it's not everywhere.
It depends where you're shopping, but it has a similar
process than the other vinegar or things like that. You
ferment it slowly let age. In this case it's whiskey barrels.
It mellows out the vinegar. Use honey vinegar like you
(27:49):
would a white balsamic, so it's naturally sweet. Brighten up
butter cream, add tang to fruit cobbler, caramelized onion jam,
kind of jug it up and kick it up a notch.
And it's from low to mid so it goes between
like four and five percent acidity, very sweet, floral. You
(28:14):
can use it in a braize chicken, that type of things.
So this breaks down the most basic kind of varieties
of vinegar. But again, think about the whole dish, the contrast,
the taking us back to the concept of photography or
(28:36):
art or design and how if something is monotonous and
it seems flat and there's no contrast or no depth
or these types of things, that often when you find
that in a dish, that often is the lack of acidity.
You're missing something to cause a vibrancy to the dullness
(29:01):
of a dish. And you could have done everything else right.
The fatten air is perfect, the heat, the temp that
you're cooking is perfect. All of those things come together well.
But what you're missing is going to be the lovely,
separating and dynamic ingredient of acid. That acid can come
(29:25):
from different places. Even buttermilk has acid in it. That's
what causes That's what causes it to become acidic and
to get that tanginess that it gets in buttermilk, and
you can use That's why many people when they're making
a fried chicken will let it marinate overnight in buttermilk
(29:47):
because that acidity, so it has functional properties like chemical reactions,
but also the way it dances on your tongue or
wakes up your taste buds in a way for you
to be able to taste the different things in a
dish in a way that brightens them and causes that contrast.
(30:10):
So it's one of those ingredients that I think many
of us will you know, make mistakes with or tend
not to put in a dish properly, or you know,
leave it out. We're afraid that it's going to mess
the dish up. Well, like any ingredient, you can mess
a dish up by putting far too much of it
(30:31):
in there. But the reality is, just like salt or
any other seasoning or fat, that you're going to have
to learn the proportions to be able to utilize it
in a way that makes everything wonderful and delicious. That's
the key of cooking, right. Controlling liquid, controlling temperature, all
(30:55):
these things are part of the experience of making a
dish at home. And so in this particular case, it's
the acid to focus on. And so I hope that
you take some of these ideas, and if you didn't
get to hear the whole thing, you can go back
and listen to the podcast of course at KFIAM six
forty dot com. But play around with it. Even if
you set aside a bowl of something if you're cooking,
(31:16):
you don't want to do it in the whole bowl.
You want to set it aside. Just keep in mind
that a little goes a long way when it comes
to acid, and the way it wakes up a dish
is always it always surprises me how just a tiny
little bit of in this case vinegar or something will
brighten up a dish, a vegetable dish or something and
(31:39):
make it taste cleaner and brighter. So I hope that
that helps and gets you focused on trying something new
if you are not comfortable with it, and there is
much more to come, so go nowhere.
Speaker 2 (31:54):
You're listening to the Fork Report with Nil Savedra on
demand from KFI AM six foard
The Fork Report w Neil Saavedra News
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