Ever since receiving a bottle of fire cider from a local farm as a gift, I have wanted to try making my own. We have made a lot of fermented foods, including hot sauces, kimchi, and fruit scrap vinegar using mason jars, but didnt have a vessel large enough to make fire cider until recently when we bought a large glass fermentation crock with a water seal (ours is 1.2 gallons).
If you havent tried it, fire cider can be made a lot a different ways, but normally has a mix of apple cider vinegar, ginger, onions, garlic, horseradish, hot peppers, herbs, and spices. The fiery taste definitely lives up to the name, and the elixir is known to support the immune system, help with digestion, reduce inflammation, and has a lot of other healthy benefits.
Growing our own ginger
I recently started growing my own ginger. This first batch of ginger was frozen before going into our first batch of fire cider. A year later I decided to try again and added on growing turmeric to my second try with ginger (post on growing our own ginger and turmeric is here).
Prep and water seal
Most of the time needed to make fire cider is in the fermentation, that takes place over weeks. The fastest part is the preparation and chopping of the vegetables. For my fire cider I chopped:
- Onions
- Hot peppers
- Herbs
- Garlic
- Ginger
After the vegetables were chopped, I packed them loosely into the fermentation crock and then filled with apple cider vinegar. Fermentation requires an airtight seal, that will keep air out, but allow gases to escape as the fermentation occurs. The crock has a lid that fits into the saucer shaped top of the vessel. When the saucer is filled with water it forms a water seal. Since the fermentation takes several weeks I had to check in periodically to refill the water in the seal.
Aging & straining
After several weeks of fermenting on the counter at room temperature, it was team to strain and bottle the fire cider. After straining the fiery liquid into bottles with a swing top lid I added additional powdered spices (turmeric and ginger).
At this point the fire cider can continue to ferment in the bottle or can be refrigerated.
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