"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.
