There are few things more frustrating than going into your kitchen to prepare a recipe you've been planning to make all day, only to find out that you're missing a key ingredient. For myriad reasons, going to the store to get it seems impossible. It only gets worse when you start searching your cabinets for a suitable replacement and find you're missing the substitutes as well.
If the ingredient you're missing is red wine vinegar, there's no need to panic. Almost everyone has two ingredients right in their pantry needed to solve that particular dilemma: a bottle of red wine and a bottle of white vinegar. Combining red wine and white vinegar as a substitute for red wine vinegar is sort of a no-brainer, since one could argue that red wine as a main ingredient for red wine vinegar is key to the fermentation process for the latter.
A bacteria called acetobacter turns the alcohol from the wine into acetic acid, which gives the vinegar its slightly sour or bitter taste. The full flavor of red wine vinegar comes from the different wines used in the process, giving the vinegar tart and tannic flavors, while others are fruiter and tangier. Aging can also affect the flavor of the vinegar.
More expensive red wine vinegars can be aged in wood casks for up to two years. Other vinegars may work as a substitute Making your red wine vinegar substitute is easy: Just combine half the amount needed of red wine with the other half of white vinegar. After whisking the two liquids together, let th.