Wednesday 12 June 2013

Chive flower vinegar

At this time of year the garden is bountiful, full of promise and flowering its heart out. I have always had a passion for herbs considering them some of the most useful plants in the garden, as they combine culinary and medicinal uses with great texture and form and in the case of chives stunning flowers too.



Chives, spikey pinky purple flowers erupt from the top of the plant, they are attractive to insects and attractive to me. The flowerheads are a great addition to a salad, but to capture their lovely sweet spicy oniony essence for a little longer you need to make chive flower vinegar. This lovely light vinegar is ideal in salad dressings, with fish or just to ring the changes and its such a gorgeous colour.

All you need to do is collect enough chive flowers to lightly pack your chosen jar and then select your vinegar, white wine or champagne vinegar works well as it allows the lovely flower colour to be extracted to create a pinky hue to the condiment. You leave the flowers steeping until the vinegar is your desired hue and has the required level of chive flavour. You could also make this with wild garlic or garlic chives but the resultant vinegar wouldn't be such a beautiful colour.




I am also adding this to the lovely Lavender and Lovage's Cooking with Herbs challenge 

                                       

5 comments:

Janice said...

What a great idea!

Karen S Booth said...

FABULOUS idea for vinegar! I am a HUGE fan of flower and herb flavoured vinegars and this one is brilliant! I just made some elderflower vinegar, and cannot wait to use it in about 2 weeks time, a lovely entry ito Herbs on Saturday - Cooking with Herbs, and sorry for the broken link - I edited and forgot to edit on HTML, which wipes the linky out! All sorted now and I will add this for you. Karen

Unknown said...

Brilliant idea and it looks so pretty too :)

Jane Willis said...

This looks lovely - both to look at and to drool over. I'll be making some!

Anonymous said...

What an absolutely beautiful idea! I love flavoured vinegars but I've never used chive flowers before. Your photographs are enough to convince me! Thanks for then inspiration. Love your blog!

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