So – I’m drying pears and apples and grapes today, and came across the fact that you can make vinegar out of the apple and pear SCRAPS! It’s as simple as throwing the cores and slightly bruised bits or peels (I don’t usually peel these) in a jar and covering them with water and covering the jar with a cloth rubber-banded on, and setting it in a dark corner of your kitchen for a few weeks. The first week you poke the floating fruit down every day — and when it naturally settles to the bottom, leave it until it turns darker and smells vinegary. Then strain the fruit out and let it sit for another few weeks – and bottle it up! It will make it’s own “mother” which you can use as ‘starter’ for more batches – although, obviously you don’t NEED a ‘mother’ to do this!
This is especially nice for those apples that fall from the tree before they are fully ripe or have a worm hole or a bird peck or a bruise or two.
I love this because I spend a lot on organic apple cider vinegar (I use it as a hair rinse among other things) AND I hate throwing away perfectly good food! (although my chickens would happily eat them) Beautiful!
I have just begun this process so I don’t know how successful I will be. I will do an update in a month or so to let you know.
Have you done this? How did it work?
The Holistic Garden 
We do this on apples every year and make gallons of it, it’s awesome especially as we use ACV not only for ourselves for food and hair, but to put in our ducks’ and chickens’ water as a healthy supplement. Funny though as I was JUST wondering if I could do this with pear peels as well when I was canning last week, and while they’re all gone now (chooks ate ’em), next year I will definitely try it with pears (which makes sense, considering pears are fermented for perry just like apples are for hard cider…). Looking forward to hearing how it goes!
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Thanks for the confirmation that it works! I am looking forward to having enough to use for my chickens as well! The pears are bubbling away, so I have confidence that they will make it to the vinegar stage at some point. I will let you know.
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No, I have not done this, but want to. I do happen to use quite a bit of vinegar. We can not possible use all the apples from the abandoned trees. Heck, I can not even keep up with pruning all the trees!
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I’m still slicing and drying windfall apples and cutting the bruises and saving the cores to throw into my vinegar crock. It’s still too early to say how it will work. The pear scraps are bubbling away in a big jar… I have heard from others and read about others this works for, so I’m excited, especially since it’s so easy and free! If you have lots of fruit available it would be a great way to use a lot of otherwise unusable apples! How cool is that?!
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