I asked a friend to buy me some white vinegar (for cleaning) and she brought me white wine vinegar. How are they different? Can I use the wine vinegar in the same way?
Short answer: All vinegars are made by fermenting alcoholic liquids with acetobacteria, which consumes the ethanol and produces acetic acid. White wine vinegar is specifically made from white wine, whereas standard white vinegar, also known as distilled vinegar or spirit vinegar, is made from a neutral grain spirit, like vodka. Wine vinegar will have a more distinctive flavor than spirit vinegar, preserving some of the characteristics of the wine it was made out of.
Wine vinegar might be better for cooking, or making a salad dressing, but I wouldn’t recommend using it to clean your furniture with.
White and distilled vinegars are just dilute aqueous solutions of acetic acid without all the impurities that make other vinegars yummy. Most acetic acid is not produced by fermentation. I poked around briefly to see if chemically produced acetic acid (e.g. produced via methanol carbonylation) could be labeled as vinegar. I’m assuming no, but didn’t see anything definitive.
It can’t be in Britain, at any rate. Vinegar substitute has to be labelled “non-brewed condiment”. The stuff you get in British fish-and-chip shops is usually non-brewed condiment (labelled as such, if you bother to look), apparently so as appease religious zealots who will not touch anything that once had alcohol in it, even if it does not have any any more.
depends on the cleaning wanted. it will still be a weak acidic effect as white vinegar though it might leave residue that white vinegar wouldn’t.
I wasn’t even sure if it was allowed in food. I see it is, although I’ve not seen that particular labeling here in the US.
If the white vinegar is actual vinegar, just made, and then distilled, from fermented grain rather than fermented wine, then I do not see why why it should have any lesser amount of impurities in it, just different ones.
As already noted, at least in Britain, you are not allowed to call it vinegar unless it is made in this sort of way (though even if it is made in a chemical factory from Og knows what, that is no guarantee of purity).
Almost any sort of vinegar will work fine for cleaning. The reason that white vinegar is what’s usually recommended for this purpose is that it’s by far the cheapest, and the things that make other vinegars more expensive will be wasted if you’re just using it for cleaning.
I guess that is true, but it then prompts me to wonder how come it is cheaper? Surely it has been put through an extra processing stage (distillation) that other vinegars have not.
Distilled vinegar isn’t called that because the vinegar itself is distilled, but because it’s derived from a distilled spirit.
So what? It is still an extra step, no matter whether the alcohol turned to acetic acid before or after the distilling.
According to On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee, distilled vinegar in the U.S. is made from distilled alcohol, while in the U.K. it’s made by doing acetic fermentation of unhopped beer which is then distilled to concentrate the acetic acid.
Distilled vinegar consists almost entirely of acetic acid and water. Other types of vinegars contain other flavor compounds. One reason that distilled vinegar is preferred for cleaning is that it doesn’t leave a residue. If you used a wine vinegar (for example) to clean a window it might leave streaks.
As for why distilled vinegar is cheaper than other types of vinegars. . . While it’s true that the distillation introduces another step in the process, the fact that it’s distilled means that you don’t have to be careful in how it’s produced. To make wine vinegar, for example, you must first make wine that’s good enough that it won’t result in bad-tasting vinegar. But for distilled vinegar, the flavor of the hooch doesn’t matter because the distillation process will remove all the flavor compounds (except for the acetic acid).