Reason #957 Why Sugar is Awesome.

Dear Tricia, Let's say someone is making something and uses a little too much cider vinegar...is there something said person can do to counteract the vinegar? What about salt or other spices? This is purely hypothetical...I never make mistakes. I have a friend that is curious.


Of course its hypothetical... Is it the same friend who spilled red wine on my white couch last month? Because I know I certainly didn't do that. I never spill anything, ever.
Being vinegar- happy is an easy fix, and all it takes is.... wait for it...... wait for it.........








Sugar!








Right, sugar. (Suck on that, Dr. Atkins! Sugar can be awesome!) Start adding sugar a little at a time, stirring it in to whatever you screwed up and tasting it as you go. There's no recipe or formula here. Sorry. You messed it up and the universe isn't going to coddle you anymore. But keep adding a little bit of sugar until the flavor starts to balance out. If you're making soup, you may want to add a little brothk or water, or whatever the base of the soup is and that may help out as well.

In trying to figure out the science of why sugar works, I stumbled across the pH scale. Remember that lovely pH scale in 7th grade science? Acids are on one side of the pH scale in the 0's and 1's. Bases, or alkalines, are on the other side over in the 13-14 side. Neutral is right in the middle around 7. (In my mind, Lindsay Lohan would be at 0 with battery acid, Betty White would be at 14 with drain cleaner, and Jennifer Love Hewitt and her brain cell-robbing facial expressions would be neutral at 7.) Vinegar is acidic- it hangs out with the 2's and 3's in Lindsay Lohan's neighborhood on the acid side of the pH scale. I thought that maybe, to cancel out all that vinegar flavor, sugar might be hanging out with Betty White on the base side of things. But I was wrong: sugar is neutral, right around 6 and 7 with pure water and Jennifer Love Hewitt. So it's not counteracting anything, just masking the flavor. And that's fine too, because it still fixed your problem. Er, I mean, your friend's problem.

Peter Piper Picked 10-14 Pounds of Pickled Peppers

Dear Tricia, Since I have seemed to successfully pickle myself, I thought I could do the same to various vegetables and try my hand at canning. All the recipes I have call for white distilled vinegar. Boring. I wanted to use rice vinegar in a few of my pickling experiments, but I'm afraid I'll poison folks since it doesn't have the 5% acidity that seems to be required. "Merry Christmas, here's a jar of botulism for you". Also, how/where can I score cheap canning supplies?

Happy National Pickle Day! Turns out, November 14th is the national day for pickling things (other than your liver), so its serendipitous that I chose this weekend to solve your conundrum.
Alrighty Polly Pickle Pants, lets get to business. You're right: you need at least 5% acidity for vinegars to pickle with, and most of them qualify except for that wimpy rice vinegar which only measures up to about 4%. (Compared to apple cider vinegar's 5%, balsamic's 6%, and sherry vinegar's 7%)
At first I wasn't hopeful. But then throughout my Sunday morning of searching pickling websites and playing Tetris, I found a pickled onion recipe on a great website called canningacrossamerica.com that included both red wine vinegar and rice vinegar in equal parts:

6 lbs. of sliced red onions
2 quarts good red wine vinegar
2 quart seasoned rice wine vinegar
2 quarts sugar
1 T. black peppercorns
3 bay leaves
½ Cup mustard seeds

This leads me to assume that if you have the required 5% acidity from the red wine vinegar, adding rice vinegar shouldn't lower the pickling power, as long as at least half of the total amount of vinegar has the necessary 5%. Think of using sunscreen: if you mix equal parts SPF 40 and SPF 20 together, you're still going to get SPF 40 coverage.
The other thing I wanted to point out is that rice wine vinegar and rice vinegar are the exact same thing. It all comes from fermented rice wine that has a bacteria added to it to turn it into vinegar. (And for the life of me, I can't find out what bacteria they add. The suspense is killing me, so if anyone knows, email me pronto.) So you can use them interchangeably. Just don't use plain old rice wine by mistake. That will just get you drunk and leave you with a mean stomache ache.
Cheap canning supplies are pretty easy to come by. I checked ebay and they have pressure cookers for like 30 bucks, canning racks for less than 5 bucks, and full pot/rack combos for cheap too.
The most expensive part of canning, as you know, is buying the jars. If you want to bargain shop online, check out overstock.com where you can find sets of 24 for about 30 bucks (you'll just have to fork over some cash for the shipping). Wal-Mart has cheap mason jars, but I'm not a fan of supporting that company (for like a million different reasons), so go check out your local hardware store. They always have tons of cool stuff for cooking that you never knew you needed, and if they don't have mason jars, they'll probably special order them for you. A wink and a nod usually does the trick.
And with all this talk about pickled things, it had me wondering how much a peck of them would really equal? It turns out that a peck is a quarter of a bushel, equaling about 2 gallons of dry weight, or 10-14 pounds. That's a good one to throw out at your next cocktail party.