My very own SCOBY

 Tonight I was making a marinade for a flank steak that called for balsamic vinegar. The bottle looked like it had a 1/4 cup of vinegar in it but nothing would come out. Instead, it appeared that there was a small liver in the bottle. Gross, right? It's a SCOBY, which means Symbiotic Culture of Bacteria and Yeast. It's also called a mother, as in the Mother of Vinegar. This gross blob is the progenitor of new vinegar, and I'm pretty psyched that it appeared in my bottle.

Based on a very cursory Google search about this phenomenon, it's sort of uncommon with balsamic, which is typically barrel-aged. I'm also excited because it opens yet another avenue of home science for me. In other words, I love this shit. My adult partner, aka my husband, does not love this shit. He loves me very much and loves that I love this stuff BUT his appreciation for my homesteading instinct is limited to the IDEA that I like homesteading, not the actual bacteria and yeast cultures I might be nurturing in our house. Hopefully, he won't read this post, and if he does, he'll pretend it isn't true and can go on in blissful ignorance of my vinegar experiment. 

As excited as I am, I am not renaming the blog the Revenge of SCOBY, and I do not want anyone to give me a kombucha mother. Those are actually gross. I'm talking directly here to a neighbor of mine who once gifted a kombucha scoby to another person who then tried to leave it at my house. No thank you.

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