Lindsay Kolasa

The magnificent apple tree…of the rose family…offers us so much.

Shade.

Oxygen.

Fruit for enjoying fresh, cooked, canned, juiced, or fermented (cider, cizer, vinegar, etc).

Inner bark, flowers, and leaves for plant medicine (cooling, astringent, and supporting us with assimilation of the food we eat).

Pectin.

Quercetin.

Beauty.

Morel mushrooms love to appear around old apple trees.

How many songs and poems have been written about the lovely apple tree?

In the dark nights of Winter, people are still wassailing and blessing the old apple orchards.

All of these insights might help you understand why I packed up my family at 8 am one Saturday morning this September to drive an hour to harvest heirloom, no spray apples from a nearby farm. I must say that it is very impressive that these apples are being grown in the Piedmont of NC, a difficult place to grow apples.

The bountiful harvest of imperfectly perfect apples urged my daughter and I to explore new things. I have pressed cider before while living in Western North Carolina and enjoyed its naturally fermented fizz of liquid sunshine. I have made apple pie and apple crisps. However, I had not made vinegar yet.

Now was the time.

We pressed out some cider to ferment. Then, we took the pressed apple bits and cores from making cider and put some water, honey, and a little apple cider vinegar on top to make a larger batch of apple cider vinegar. Pouring some apple cider vinegar helped ‘seed’ the ferment so that acetic acid prevailed and got to work on the apple scraps sooner.

The concoction sat in a large steel bowl with a kitchen cloth over it for a week. Then, we strained and transferred the liquid into a ball jar. In about a week’s time, ‘the mother’ formed, the symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast specifically for producing vinegar — and our apple cider vinegar was complete.

I don’t know why it has taken me so long to make vinegar. It was such a satisfying and rather simple process! I’ll definitely be saving fruit scraps for more vinegar making. Pineapple skin vinegar will be next.

My trusty resource for such explorations is Sandor Katz’s ‘Wild Fermentation.’ I bought this book while living in San Francisco around 2004 or so. Every year I would go to the Green Fest and learn new things. This book jumped out at me and I knew I had to have it. I have made so many tasty creations with this book and his second book (his life work).

It seems vinegar can do almost anything besides stop the hubris of billionaires and the Big Tech industry, but maybe it can help with that, too (smile).

I’ve used vinegar to wipe out a plantar wart on the bottom of my foot.

I use it to draw minerals from the bones when making a bone broth.

I use vinegar to draw minerals from herbs and deliver them to my body in an easy to assimilate form.

I use vinegar to rinse my hair and protect my scalp from microbes.

I use vinegar to clean my home.

My neighbor uses vinegar for outer ear infections.

I use vinegar to clean clothing.

I use vinegar with herbs and rose water to make an amazing facial toner.

I use vinegar in salad dressings…

And on and on…

Sing hail to thee, old apple tree.
Long may you live and bud and blow,
Through sun and shower may you grow
All your boughs with apples bending low.

Hats full and caps full, baskets and bags full.
See our apples round and red.
Hats full and caps full, baskets, bags full
Of apples round and ripe and red.

(Traditional English Wassailing song)