One of my roommates used to live in Toronto, and after going to the movies here in Boston she was complaining that they didn’t have salt and vinegar powder to sprinkle on the popcorn that is apparently ubiquitous up there. Immediately my brain started spinning and next thing you know I was looking up everything about vinegar powder. The varieties available, where you can buy it, and of course how to make it. I sort of regret becoming so obsessed with the idea, because there wasn’t exactly a specific guide or recipe out there. I tried a few things I saw that were similar to what I wanted, and after lots of trial and error I finally came up with a powder made from mostly vinegar.

The problem here was that this powder wasn’t exactly the punch you in the face vinegar kick that I know and love from modern day salt and vinegar chips. It was more the wimpy dull vinegar from chips that used to be popular 10 years ago. I’m not a scientist but I do know from years of cooking that the chemical that makes the vinegar flavor actually burns off at a temperature that is slightly below boiling. This is why when you boil vinegar it smells so crazy in your house (You might have recently smelled this smell dying Easter eggs). This is also why a balsamic reduction has a stronger “balsamic” flavor, but a mellower vinegar bite, and why a recipe tastes much different if you add the vinegar at the beginning or at the end. I think that the way they make this powder commercially is to reduce the liquid without actually heating it. I was thinking of trying this again by putting the liquid on a large sheet pan with a fan on it, but I don’t have a million hours to wait for it to reduce to one tenth its volume!