We may receive a commission on purchases made from links.
Vinegar, including apple cider vinegar, is a wonderfully versatile product that can be used for anything from pest control to home cleaning to making a tasty marinade. You can even add it to your homemade pie crust for a more interesting depth of flavor than what you’d get from just butter, flour, and eggs. If you’re planning to use your apple cider vinegar in a non-culinary way, it should be totally fine to grab the cheapest bottle available. However, if you’re wanting to add it to a recipe, particularly something like a salad dressing where it’s a star ingredient, you’ll want to make sure the vinegar has a good flavor on its own. Thankfully, Chowhound has ranked 11 apple cider vinegar brands to help savvy shoppers determine which bottles of ACV to add to their cart and which ones to leave on the shelf.
For cooking purposes, you basically can’t go wrong with the Bragg brand, which snagged the top four spots in the ranking. Bragg’s apple cider vinegar also featured most prominently on the list as it came in three flavored offerings (cayenne honey, citrus ginger, and honey) in addition to the plain-and-simple option. On the other hand, you should absolutely not use Kroger’s apple cider vinegar for cooking if you can avoid it. According to our reviewer, this vinegar tastes like cleaning product and flavored white vinegar, rather than something made using apples from start to finish. (If you really want the full apple flavor, you can always make your own apple cider vinegar with just three ingredients.)
Taking cost into account
If you’re buying vinegar for cleaning or other non-cooking uses, it makes more sense to go the Kroger route when considering price. Kroger’s apple cider vinegar is much cheaper than Bragg’s, coming in at $1.49 for 16 ounces. For comparison, Bragg’s unflavored apple cider vinegar is $8.99 for 32 ounces (about $4.50 for 16 ounces), while its flavored varieties are $8.99 for just 16 ounces. Other strikes against Kroger’s apple cider vinegar in Chowhound’s ranking were that it comes in an ugly plastic bottle and doesn’t contain the mother, the good bacteria involved in fermenting which typically adds quite a bit of nutrients to the bottle. If you’re not cooking with it, these considerations probably matter less.
However, one final strike against the Kroger brand is that it’s more difficult to find than other brands, as Kroger grocery stores can’t be found across the entire United States. In this case, you could also opt for the Heinz brand for your non-cooking ACV uses, which also received a low ranking on Chowhound’s list. At $3.99 for 32 ounces, it also won’t set you back too much.
