“you’re really scraping the bottom of the barrel” girl i am living that balsamic life, that’s the mommy down there at the bottom.
#are you havinf a stroke or am i i can NOT understand this
Balsamic vinegar is made by aging a reduced grape syrup in barrels with “mother”, which is a kind of bacterial slime that develops naturally in the vinegar over time. True balsamic vinegar goes through a very particular process of aging it in a series of smaller and smaller barrels, transferring it from one barrel to the next either every year, or every few years, depending on the process, and then adding fresh syrup to the largest barrel and continuing the process. The slimy film that forms on the insides of the barrels is the mother, and due to the increased concentrations over the years, the mother in the smallest barrel is most potent, and is sometimes partially removed and used to seed new batches of vinegar, so production can be expanded. Scraping the mother from the bottom of the barrel is how you multiply the goodness, the sweetness, and the quality of your balsamic.
If you’ve ever bought a bottle of apple cider vinegar and thought “what’s that cloudy stuff at the bottom?”, that’s the mommy <3
This is also a part of what makes a high quality balsamic, well, high quality. And part of what makes it expensive. Good quality balsamic is all about age, both the age of the batch itself, and the age of the mother that seeds it. Balsamic has to be at least 12 years old, but you can age it much longer, and many places do. As for the mother, that requires literal lifetimes. Some of the oldest balsamic producing families in Modena have mothers that have been kept alive for centuries, passed down through the generations to seed new batches year after year after year, hundreds of years over. The bacterial cultures develop unique and incredible flavors in this time, and you can really taste it in the end product. It’s the kind of flavor and quality only age can offer.
we have entered laika’s autism zone. u will learn food and cooking facts, whether you want to or not.
Is it called balsamic because of the wood? Because balsam is a type of tree and that’s what they make the barrel from? Or some other reason?
(i could look it up, but I prefer to get my info dumped straight from the delicious autistic barrel)
Without looking it up, I’m guessing not? But maybe they share a common root or something. I don’t know much about balsa wood, but from my few interactions with it i have a hard time imagining it would make a good barrel. Given the region and the context of balsamic’s history, I would assume they are aged in the same barrels as wine, most likely oak.
Okay, I was gonna just post that but i had to go look it up. So, yes, oak is one of the main woods used for balsamic barrels, but apparently a variety of woods are used, including cherry, juniper, and ash. Balsa wood is not among those, however, which makes sense given that it’s an american tree. Balsa and Balsamic also do not share a common root, with Balsamic deriving from a latin word meaning “curative” or “restorative”, and Balsa, the wood/tree, deriving from the spanish word for “float”, as it was often used to make rafts and barges.
ooooh!
…and NOW I’m down another researching hole, where I’m learning that “balsam” and “balsa” (which I’d assumed to be the same or at least connected) refer to completely different plants.
(balsa being the tree with the lightweight wood… and balsam being one of those very unspecific plant words, which can be anything from impatiens to fir trees– and refers mainly to the fact that you can make an aromatic product called balsam from the resin of the plant)
(and this aromatic balsam seems to get its name from the same Latin/Hebrew route as “balsamic,” but the substance itself is not at all involved in making balsamic vinegar. Fascinating)