Recipe & How-To: Herbal Vinegar Infusions

We'll be chatting about cleaning with vinegar! + a touch of the magic of cleansing herbs

Sometimes the simplest of plant infusions — the easily accessible stuff, can be the gateway to a lifelong journey in working with plants and their medicine. Infused vinegars are easy. Almost everyone has a bottle of vinegar in the back of their cabinet. It’s also incredibly cheap at most supermarkets. I’m pretty sure you might be able to make this preparation today! If not, gathering the ingredients is cheap and easy.

Today my focus is mostly on cleaning vinegar.

White vinegar vs. apple cider vinegar.

If you have some apple cider vinegar in your cabinet instead of white, you may be tempted to use it for cleaning, and you can! But I would suggest using white cleaning vinegar instead. Why? White vinegar, or cleaning vinegar has a higher acid content than apple cider vinegar. Acetic acid content in white vinegar can be up to 10%, whereas apple cider can cap out at about 6-7%. Acetic acid is our cleaning and extracting agent here! Apple cider vin I lean into for food preparation (also have you noticed how expensive it can be nowadays?)

I have personally infused with both, and have found the white vinegar to be superior and does a little better at extracting. Apple cider vin tends to be syrupy when you infuse it for a long period of time. Really it’s just a matter of preference, but I notice that good apple cider vinegars are best left for cooking and making vinegar based herbal medicine.

Now, I am not about to say that vinegar infusions take the place of disinfecting. I don’t think they do, but they do have mild cleaning power on surfaces.