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04/16/08 |
                
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GG's Awesome Kombucha Yields infinity litres 3/4 c. washed raw sugar 2 litre water 1 pkg. Ten-Ren white tea 1 pkg. Yamamotoyama jasmine tea 1 pkg. Yamamotoyama genmaicha tea 1 btl. G.T.'s Raw & Organic Kombucha Mix sugar and water, bring to boil. After you reach the boil, steep tea packets in mixture for 20-30 mins. Remove tea packs and let mixture cool to about 110 degrees F, or "baby bottle" temperature. At this point, add the bottle of GT's Kombucha. Pour entire mess into an extremely clean (damn near sterile) vessel and cover with cheesecloth. Allow everything to hang out at room temp for a minimum of three weeks. At this point, you should notice a distinct "mushroom" of the kombucha bacterium floating on the top of your batch (it'll be the only solid thing in the liquid). Carefully lift this out and place in a clean (again, damn near sterile) bowl along with about 1 cup of your brew. Repeat the first step of making the tea/sugar/water mix (we'll call this the "food") and letting it cool back to "baby bottle" temp before adding the mushroom and the reserved cup of brew back into the mix. Again, let rest for a minimum of two to three weeks before harvesting your brew. After about four months of repeating this every two weeks or so, your mushroom should be vigorous enough to produce a fully-carbonated version of kombucha about every week or so. Continue to use the above measurements for creating a new batch of food for it, and your kombucha mushroom should be happy as a clam and last for a long time!
Note from GG: I remember picking up a bottle of Kombucha at Ballard Market one night because I knew I was going to be hung over the next day, and they didn't carry Naked Food Juice anymore. It was a shot in the dark, and boy did it pay off. First of all, kombucha is delicious, tasting like some kind of weird carbonated apple cider (even though it's derived from tea). Second, and more importantly, kombucha is supposed to have all these crazy health benefits like better liver function, increased blood flow, toxin removal, etc. Third, if you make it yourself, it's renewable FOREVER, not unlike that sourdough culture that people passed off as "Amish friendship bread" back when you were in high school. Now then, about why I did my recipe the way I did. GT's Kombucha quite often contains a very tiny mushroom of kombucha bacterium, which you'd never notice unless you were looking for it. The way you can get the mushroom out of GT's brew is to pop the cap and wait for it to float up to the top of the bottle; after this, you can pour out about a cup plus the mushroom and save it for brewing. This means it's beautifully suited for seeding a new mushroom, provided you take the time and do things right. BTW, I have no idea why the bacteria float is called a "mushroom," I just know that it is, and I'm going with it. I kind of fell in love with raw sugar after I made some cookies with it and they had a really wonderful, molasses-ey quality to them. It's also kind of cool that raw sugar feels a lot like kosher salt, so you can measure them in similar manners. As far as the tea combination goes, I experimented with a few different combis before I settled on this one. You've got the jasmine for its floral fragrance, the genmaicha for its earthy grounding qualities and white tea for its superlative balance. I messed around with orange pekoe, sencha, mugicha, "breakfast blend", red rose and others, but this was the combination that produced the most well-balanced kombucha I'd had. It's fragrant on the nose, bitter and lingering on the palate, and sour and crisp on the finish. Awesome stuff. My last bit of advice here is to PAY ATTENTION. With this recipe, you are, in fact, home brewing. This means you need to really, really be concerned with cleanliness, sterilization, sanitation, contamination, etc. If you don't cover your culture with cheesecloth, you wind up with a nasty bit of moldy tea instead of properly fermented kombucha. If your vessels aren't spectacularly clean, you're going to wind up with something potentially toxic (if not lethal) instead of something healthy (if not life-saving). And for God's sake, don't ever use metal when you're straining things out. This (for some reason) sterilizes the bacterium, and no amount of fermentation time will ever cause your kombucha to rise! Use plastic, wood or glass please, unless you're "harvesting," (putting it in bottles for consumption) in which case, use whatever you want. And don't be afraid of your kombucha mushroom if it starts to look like it's gone completely rotten (mine has a really hard growth of somegoddamnthing on its top), just keep sticking with it until you're ready to go. My culture is actually older than my cat (I started it in March 2008), and I have to harvest once a week out of necessity. And as a last bit of information, "kombucha" has nothing to do with "kombu," Japanese kelp. It's a tea ("-cha") for sure, but has nothing to do with kombu. As long as we're clear on that. Of all the recipes I've posted thus far, this is the one that makes me feel like I'm really treading on thin ice because of the possibility of contamination, spoilage and the potential for killing my readers. Please be careful with this, guys.
This site was last updated 01/02/08 |
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