Category: Everyday Life

Apricot vinegar drink, and after

To tell the truth, I was not sure when I should remove the apricots from the vinegar.
However, we already tasted our apricot sour drink a few days ago.
(We might say ‘It tastes like ume plums’, but that wouldn’t be good enough. We should say ‘It tastes like apricots’! I put rock sugar in it so the taste would be more refreshing. If you don’t dilute it enough with water, it’s powerful!)

I searched the website of a famous vinegar company in Japan, which made the two kinds of vinegar I used for our sour drink, and I found a recipe for ume plum sour drink. It suggested I should remove the fruit from the vinegar after three weeks. Plums and apricots are very close relatives compared to the other fruit sour drinks on the website, such as banana, orange, and pineapple. (Soft fruits such as bananas should be removed after one week.)

The vinegar marinated fruit looked very sour, but I didn’t want to toss it, so I cooked jam with honey.

The vinegar-marinated-apricot jam became pretty sweet and sour, and it stuck in my throat.
Chris said it wasn’t as sweet and sour as he expected, and he had the idea to use it like a chutney.
Yes, that might work.

Anyway, drinking the sour drink we made, we’ll survive the coming hot summer!
We almost finished the apricot jam I cooked on the same day: the 14th of June.
The apricot brandy needs some more time.

The picture below is today’s present to us.
It’s also an ume plum vinegar made with honey. Looks tasty!

– YS, 5 July 2008

5 July 2008