I am puzzled - why keep what is essentially a preservative, in the fridge? We keep tomato sauce and salad cream in the fridge (for no really good reason) but not vinegar.
Probably wants to muffle the sound of the bottle constantly saying “5 percent.” That shit can get annoying.
On a more serious note, I seemed to remember from long ago vinegar forming a film on top that my grandmother called mother. Turns out this wasn’t one of those insane confabulated things.
So, hehe, um can you drink it? :o
While you can make acetic acid from petroleum sources, I don’t think you’re legally allowed to call the resulting product “vinegar”. If all you’re using it for is cleaning and middle-school science projects, though, it shouldn’t make a difference.
The patience of Job …
Yeah, I have vague memories of vinegar developing a mother back in the 80s, but I haven’t seen it since. Well, actually, that might not be true. I think there was a bottle of unfiltered apple cider with the selling point that the mother was in it that I bought a decade ago, but I can’t remember any spontaneously formed mother from regular commercial vinegar since the 80s.
I initially read this as “forming a film on top of my grandmother” and I was greatly unnerved.
My mother always refused to have vinegar on her chips from the chip shop. She said that the stuff they used wasn’t ‘real’ and was a by product from the oil industry. Are you saying that there was a grain (ha!) of truth in her foible?
(I still only get salt on my chips and put my own vinegar on when I get home. But I do it because the vinegar soaks through the paper and makes the car smell funny.)
In the UK, there is a vinegar divide. If you buy fish and chips in the south, you will be offered malt vinegar; in the North it will be white. In some places there is a choice.
In the supermarket, most pickled onions are in malt. The exception is those tiny white ones some people put in cocktails.