Super for your salads at home
and in the Roadhouse pulled pork barbecue

This great apple cider vinegar might well be one of the humblest ingredients we have on hand in the ZCoB. It gets very little attention, and it’s almost never written about in articles, yet its quality contributes quietly to the full flavor and deliciousness of any number of better-known Zingerman’s dishes.

It’s probably been over 30 years now since I tracked down this vinegar. As I was doing the research for the little pamphlet that became “Zingerman’s Guide to Good Vinegar,” I kept reading about how apple cider vinegar was at the core of colonial cooking. It was in every old American cookbook. And yet, when I looked around the modern-day marketplace—filling up as it was with artisan offerings from Europe—I couldn’t find traditionally made cider vinegars. This is, of course, in the days before the internet, so tracking down obscure items took more than two minutes. Eventually, I got the name of Pierre Gingras, a vinegar maker in Montérégie, about 45 minutes to the southwest of Montreal.

Get to Know Gingras

The Gingras family has been doing pretty much everything a vinegar fan would want for over a century. Organically grown apples are hand-picked specifically to be made into vinegar. No windfalls are used; if you hadn’t realized it, the name windfall originally had nothing to do with finance—it’s about fruit that falls from the tree in heavy winds. Windfalls are easy to gather but have been bruised and begin to oxidize immediately thereafter. By contrast, most commercial cider vinegar is made by repressing the “dregs” left behind after a first pressing is done for fresh cider. With the Gingras’ vinegar, it’s just the juice of whole fresh apples that’s used.

The crew of vinegar makers at Gingras use the old-school natural conversion process (known as the Orleans method after the French city on the Loire River). It takes place in what they call “The Founder’s Cellar,” which has 36 very large casks made from French oak, each of which holds 5400 liters. The Gingras Founder’s Cellar is apparently the largest vinegar aging cellar of this sort anywhere on the planet. During the aging, the vinegar is given room to breathe and evaporate out of the wood cask. They mature the vinegar for over a year and it is unpasteurized and unfiltered. Most importantly, it tastes terrifically of apples! In 2017, Vinaigrerie Gingras was bought by the Levasseur family, owners of Au Coeur de la Pomme not far from Montérégie in Frelighsburg, where they have been producing apples and artisan apple cider vinegar for over 30 years. They have diligently continued on with all of Pierre Gingras’ positive vinegar-making practices!

Gingras packs in glass bottles so you can see the natural mother of the vinegar floating inside. It’s a wispy bit of a white cloud that you may—or may not—see in each bottle depending on how the vinegar comes out of the barrels. If you do see it, know that it’s totally edible and actually packs extra enzymes, minerals, and vitamins.

For your own use at home, you’ll find the Gingras vinegar for sale at Zingerman’s Mail Order and on the shelves at the Deli. Here, we use the vast majority of what we buy in the kitchen at the Roadhouse. It’s been the core vinegar in the Eastern North Carolina barbecue at the Roadhouse since we first opened in 2003. With the wonderful new Michigan-raised Red Wattle hogs that the Roadhouse has sourced over the last six weeks or so, the pulled pork has increased in flavor even further still. The Gingras vinegar costs us about 10 times as much as the mass-market commercial cider vinegars that nearly everyone else uses. But it tastes sooooooo much better!

Get your Gingras