Two words: Jamón Vinegar. What, José??
A conversation with the vinegar maker Daniel Liberson of Lindera Farms
Happy Monday, friends—I hope you all ate something delicious over the weekend. I was at SXSW in Austin, Texas, and was happy to be able to check out a few of my favorites like LeRoy and Lewis, which makes some of the best barbecue I’ve ever had (their beef cheeks are life-changing!).
Today I want to introduce you to someone who I think is doing absolutely fascinating work in rural Virginia. He works on a farm, but he’s not a farmer. He preserves the height of every season’s produce, but you’ll never see a fruit or a vegetable when you’re trying his product. What he makes is fermented, but it won’t get you drunk.
I’m talking about Daniel Liberson, a world-class vinegar maker who runs Lindera Farms in Virginia’s wine country with Matt DeRossett. Daniel used to be a cook at some impressive restaurants, so he’s applying the mind and the palate of someone who deeply understands food and cooking while making a unique and special product.
To me, vinegar is fascinating. It’s almost as old as civilization, with traces going back many many thousands of years. At its origin it was a mistake, probably some wine that was forgotten about (who would do that!) and left out for too long, leading to the secondary fermentation when acetic acid is produced, giving vinegar its bright tang. Once it was created by mistake, people started to make it on purpose in ancient Babylon, ancient Egypt, ancient China. In the earliest days, one of the main uses of vinegar was as a healthy and inexpensive drink, with Roman soldiers being given a mixed called posca—a combination of vinegar, water, and wine—instead of wine alone.
To many of us today, vinegar is a standard grocery store product that we use in salad dressings and maybe some marinades. We might have a few different kinds, distilled white vinegar, red or white wine vinegar, rice vinegar, maybe an expensive balsamic vinegar. By now, I hope you have a bottle of sherry vinegar!
But the uses for vinegar go way beyond salad. Have you every had a vinegar you can drink, or added one to a cocktail to get some extra acid without citrus? Have you added them to desserts, or poured some over fresh ricotta? Glazed chicken wings, anyone?
For all of these applications, Lindera Farms has a recipe and an amazing product to go with it—fruit vinegars and flower vinegars and herb vinegars and pepper vinegars. So many options for your pantry. And if it’s salad dressing you’re looking for, his vinegars are both powerfully flavored and mellow in terms of acid, so you can make 50-50 dressings with olive oil, or just use the vinegar on its own.
And a very cool thing about what Daniel is doing is that he’s not just taking a standard wine vinegar or apple cider vinegar and infusing it with fruits and vegetables. That would be too easy! He takes a much harder path—he describes it below, but just know that this is some really, truly wonderful vinegar that can be used in many different ways…drinking included (though I haven’t mixed it with wine to make posca just yet!)
Last week, my team brought Daniel in to share his vinegars with us, and to talk about a new top-secret project he’s been working on. Well, I guess top-secret until today! I’ll tell you a bit about it…and hopefully one day you’ll be able to taste it on my menus as we perfect it. It’s a collaboration between Daniel and one of the chefs on our team, Claudio Foschi—the two of them started talking about what he could do with scraps from all of the legs of jamón we go through at my restaurants (mostly bones…no meat is ever left behind!).
Daniel hadn’t worked with proteins before, so he’s gone through some amazing trials to figure out what to do to create the perfect jamón vinegar. He’ll tell you more below…
So now, here are words directly from Daniel, who spoke to my team.
What is your process, how do you make your vinegars?
The process for making the vinegar is a combination of traditional wine-making practices and modern culinary techniques. First, we do everything ourselves starting at the very beginning of the process—we forage berries, flowers, roots and herbs, bring in produce from small, local farms, and combine them with honey or molasses to turn them into an intense, flavorful wine. We then slowly ferment that into a vinegar; we don’t just add alcohol to a finished juice, nor do we blend ingredients into a finished vinegar. The process is more laborious and takes much longer. However, after allowing the vinegar to age enough for the acids to soften—which is not a practice used in the factory-produced vinegars and balsamics most of us are used to—the resulting vinegar is richer, more aromatic, and more flavorful than any vinegar you’ve tried before.
What ingredients do you like to work with?
We love to work with local, indigenous produce, especially things that are unfamiliar to most people because of their limited distribution. Two of the most amazing ones are pawpaws and Virginia persimmons, two ingredients that people don’t really know. They both have an incredibly short season and are only available in this area, so they’re hard to feature as a fruit on the plate for much of the country. So to make them into vinegar is a way to highlight them, and to make them available for the rest of the year and anyone who wants to try them.
The seasonality of making vinegar is key and fun, it allows chefs and home cooks to use flavors year round instead of just in the season. And it’s a way to use “difficult” fruits (like pawpaws, which require processing) in a quick, friendly way. There’s a flavor combination I love, beets and berries together. But how would we combine those two flavors without eating one of them out of its season? The berries in our vinegars are captured in the peak of their ripeness, so they can be combined at their best with other out-of-season ingredients. It’s like a magic trick.
What is the farm like?
The ingredients from Lindera Farms are raised in a non-interventionist process, we don't introduce anything to the growing process, no chemicals and no fertilizers, just about the only thing done is some grass mowing about twice a year. Basically, we’re subject to the whims of the environment completely…think Darwinian farming. The positives of this practice are that you get these stronger, more resilient, more flavorful fruits, herbs, and flowers with no carbon footprint or residual impact to the environment.
Sustainability shines in our process. For our ramp vinegar, we just work with the ramp leaves, and leave the bulbs in the ground, which means they can remain a perennial, and we can come back year after year to the same plants.
Do you grow everything you’re making?
While Lindera is a really, really small entity, one of the aspects of what we do that Matt and I are very proud of is the fact that we can be very selective in how we source the produce we work with. We work with small, progressive farming operations exclusively for everything we make, like Golden Angels Apiary, Next Step Produce, Agriberry, Farm Fireside, Garners Produce, and other small scale vendors who are doing really interesting and innovative things in sustainable agriculture, and while I can’t claim that we’re the biggest client of any of these producers (though if I had the kind of money to be, better believe that’s what we’d be!), we do our best to drive traffic their way and support how we’re able, and hopefully our efforts and occasional successes help their efforts in sustainable ag.
Let’s get back to those pawpaws, which are amazing—we’ve talked about them before. How do you make your pawpaw vinegar?
Growing up, I would find pawpaws growing along the Potomac, I would go to Great Falls National Park and see these fruits, and never tried them. It wasn’t until I became a cook that I actually went out to taste them and found out for myself…they’re an incredible, unique taste of the mid-Atlantic. But they’re hard to work with: they ripen quickly and then are over-ripe, and they’re difficult to process. So instead of treating pawpaws as a product you have to work with on their own terms, instead I started to look for different and novel ways to extract the flavors and aromas. Instead of thinking about it as a fruit, I started to think about it like vanilla. Pawpaws change over their ripening. At first it’s limestone and flowers and sauvignon blanc; midway it’s mango, passion fruit, and tropical. If you let them start to sunspot on the trees, they develop butterscotch notes. So what I do is pick fruits at all three stages, and combine them in the vinegar—a taste of the fruit as a whole.
So…what’s the deal with this jamón vinegar??
Well, let’s start a couple of steps back. I grew up in Northern Virginia, and I’ve been a long time fan of your restaurants. Minibar was actually our first restaurant customer. So when Claudio and I started talking about the idea of a jamón scrap vinegar, I thought…maybe this makes sense.
The idea is, how do we simulate the different parts of jamón, its unique nutty and sweet components, in a vinegar? Jamón, you can’t really cook in. You slice it, you eat it, and that’s about it. If you do anything else to it, you kind of ruin it, you get off-flavors, so how do you get that flavor of a cured ham without introducing it to heat?
The answer is fermentation. So we played different ways to extract flavors from the jamón using the idea of garum, a Roman-era fermented fish sauce that’s super powerful and punchy, something like the fish sauces of Southeast Asia. I used a spore called koji, which produces a fungal breakdown of the proteins into glutamic acids and gives us amazing umami flavors. The garum also has a level of acidity as a byproduct of the ferment, though it’s not a vinegar. The question then became: what do we blend with the garum to reach the right level of acidity, and to balance the powerful flavor of the umami-rich garum?
So then I wanted to make a vinegar that constitutes all of the aromatics of jamón, that should feel like you just ate a slice, which I could blend in with the garum. I thought about what Ibérico pigs eat, which gives the meat its unique flavors, so I knew I had to use acorns. I also think jamón has this faint coconut flavor, which I get from figs and fig leaves (which also grow in the Mediterranean), so we added those. And we used a base of apple cider vinegar, which blends with those other flavors, so it felt like a great option for fermentation. But it wasn’t jamón vinegar yet! So I went one step further and actually infused some pure alcohol (Everclear) with jamón fat to carry some of those aromatics.
So the final product—which I’m still experimenting with—is a combination of these three things: the garum, the vinegar, and the alcohol. This is not just liquid ham, it’s my unique and wild take on how to capture the flavors of jamón in vinegar form.
How do you make a product that highlights something that’s so spectacular on its own, so rare to try as a diner or home cook, while also making something that’s wholly different, and shows the product on its own—you can make a great salad with just arugula and jamón vinegar—but at the same time, it could be on the menu at minibar, where this all started? I want it to be able to do both of those things at once. Taking something that’s inherently inaccessible and making it accessible. That’s the challenge, and the beauty, of this project.
Where can I taste this jamón in vinegar form?
Nowhere yet. It’s still in the R&D process. Watch this space, or follow me on Instagram for more!
Ooh paw paws grow near me what a wonderful way to preserve that amazing flavor!
I have wanted to try paw paws since you told us about them, José! This vinegar sounds incredible!