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Oxygarum Garum Vinegar

Oxygarum Ancient Rome Garum Vinegar 250 ml

Sauce made from garum vinegar (oxygarum) and defrutum, a reduction of grape must used in Roman times as a cooking ingredient and as a base for aging wines.

Appearance: Dark color, medium intensity shine, coppery reflections.

Smell: Balsamic, mild acetic, umami, licorice, roasted aroma, with sweet and sour notes.

Taste: Mild acetic, smooth, highly palatable. Mild acetic flavor, pleasant sweetness, sweet and sour, with acetic, caramel, and salty notes. Reminiscent of balsamic spices.

PAIRING:

Ideal for cold and warm salads, vegetable stir-fries, eggs, ponzu sauce preparation, caramelizing nuts, marinating meats and fish, grilling meats and fish. It is a perfect ingredient to enhance the flavor of vegetable stews, meats, and fish, providing intensity in the mouth and amplifying aromas. Ideal for oriental cuisine.

Garum, or garo for the Greeks, is a sauce, a powerful fermented product, with a high umami content that prevailed in Roman culinary recipes. Garum is an industrial product, not homemade, as its processing and fermentation require processing in coastal salting factories, such as Carteia, Gades, Malaca, Cartago Nova, and Baelo Claudia. After fermentation, Garum, the Roman umami of the sea, is packaged in amphorae and destined for commercialization, being a highly demanded and gastronomically valued product throughout the Mediterranean region.

Gastronomically, garum is a liquid preserve that had to be tamed, transformed, and incorporated into intermediate culinary preparations in most of its culinary uses, enhancing and implementing the organoleptic characteristics of the foods and ingredients with which they interacted, once these preparations with garum were added to the entire recipe. In this way, it was fused with other ingredients such as wine, acetum (vinegar), oil, honey, or spices in each type of preparation that modulated its aroma, flavor, and color, offering salty nuances, maritime sensations, or fruity and earthy aromatic sensations. Its presence is notable in the Apician recipe book, as its use is documented in a high percentage of recipes and also replaced salt in preparations.

With the incorporation of Garum in Roman cuisine, the aim was to achieve balance and integration of all the elements that made up the recipe, or to enhance the main ingredient in the simplest recipes.

Garum could be present throughout the preparation process of the dish, which was common, or previously, acting on the main ingredient. To a lesser extent, it was added at the final stages of preparations to enhance its flavor.

In this sense, Garum diversified Roman cooking techniques to levels that are still under continuous research today.

In terms of taste, specifically liquamen, it is saline, with a taste of shellfish and blue fish, shellfish with hints of Mediterranean herbs. In addition to providing salinity, the spicy, botanical, and umami component, due to its high content of sapid substances, amino acids, and peptides, garum enhanced the flavor of foods rich in vegetable proteins and of plant or animal origin, meat, or fish. Its use in Roman times was not limited to fish dishes, shellfish, cephalopods, actinians, gastropods, or bivalves, among others.

Currently, both Red Tuna Garum and liquamen, both products have been scientifically reconstructed by the universities of Cadiz and Seville under the name Flor de Garum, and it is the only fermented product that faithfully reconstructs the characteristics of the ancient Roman sauce.

Furthermore, the recipe book attributed to Apicius included techniques to modulate and correct the potency of garum, as when combined with certain foods it offered excessive salinity if applied in excess, so one of the solutions was to modulate the salty edges of the dishes with honey, as indicated in the work Re Coquinaria (Re Coq. I, VI, 1).

In addition to its preserving action - which was not its main function in cooking - garum, with its application in preparations, favored in Roman gastronomy a high number of technological processes and techniques aimed