A Summer of Vinegar & Honey
First appeared in edible Alaska’s Summer 2022 edition.
Preserving flavors and nutrients of the warmer months.
During the Alaskan summer, plants are sprouting, greening up, flowering, fruiting, and storing their nutrients in their roots. It’s a joy to capture snippets of all this energy and savor the wild flavors and nutrients of summer later in the year. Preserving herbs in vinegar is one of the more straightforward processes since acid is a good food preservative. Vinegar also extracts many medicinal and flavorful constituents from plants, including minerals such as calcium, magnesium, and potassium. I found Beverley Gray’s Nourishing Vinegar Tonic recipe in her book, The Boreal Herbal, and got inspired to build a recipe that includes plants that come into their own at different stages of the summer — for example, both rose petals and rose hips.
Another way to preserve herbs is in honey. Honey is sweet and delectable on its own, but infusing it with herbs makes it even more flavorful and healing. Honey has antimicrobial properties, making it a good preservative, but you want to make sure not to dilute it with the water in fresh plants, so I will dry my herbs before infusing them.
Infused honeys and vinegars are flexible, and I recommend you use what you have available and enjoy eating. Once you have created infused vinegar and/or honey, you can use them however you would normally use those ingredients. I recommend not cooking them to preserve the herbal properties. I love a sweet-and-sour flavor and often combine vinegar and honey to make a shrub or a salad dressing.
Ingredients
- 2 parts vinegar I prefer to use raw apple cider vinegar.
- 1 part fresh herbs berries, or roots gathered throughout the season
Instructions
- Begin with an empty quart jar. Gather about a cup of early summer herbs (horsetail, rose petals, raspberry leaf), add them to the jar, and cover the plants with vinegar. At this point, the jar is about 1/3 full. It’s important that all the herbs are covered with vinegar, so they don’t get exposed to air and mold. Set them in a cool, dark place and shake about once a day.
- In a few weeks, gather different herbs (such as fireweed leaves and flowers, mint, pineapple weed), add them to the jar, cover with vinegar, and repeat the process. You can take the old herbs out if you want, but you don’t need to.
- When the rose hips come out, finish the process. If you need more space, strain the mixture through cheesecloth and take the old herbs out. Add late summer herbs (rose hips and dandelion root) to the jar and make sure all plant material is covered with vinegar. Let the vinegar sit for another 3 weeks, shaking it every day or so. When finished, strain through cheesecloth, discard the herbs, and bottle the vinegar in a clear container.
Ingredients
- 1 tablespoon infused honey or regular honey
- 1 tablespoon infused vinegar
- 7 ounces seltzer water
Instructions
- Combine and mix the vinegar and honey first, then add the seltzer water, stir again, and serve.
Ingredients
- 1 part dried herbs equal mix of rose petals and mint leaves, or whatever you like
- 2 parts honey
Instructions
- Fill a clean jar a little less than halfway with dried herbs. It’s important that the herbs are dried because adding water to the mix can dilute the honey and cause mold to form. Honey is antimicrobial, so dried herbs will preserve well.
- Pour honey over herbs, and use a clean utensil to help it seep through the plants. The herbs should be submerged.
- Set the jar in a cool, dark spot and turn it once a day. Let it infuse 1 to 3 weeks. When honey is infused, strain it through cheesecloth or a mesh strainer and put into a clean container. You can save your honey-soaked herbs to add to tea or other drinks.
Ingredients
- 3 ounces infused vinegar
- 3 ounces olive oil
- 1 tablespoon infused honey
- 1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
- 1 garlic clove diced
- 1 teaspoon dried or fresh herbs such as oregano, mint, basil, and rose petals (you could use the leftover mint and rose from the honey infusion)
Instructions
- Combine ingredients and serve.
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