Kombucha Tea Recipe

Happy New Year! Gut health isn't exactly a glamorous subject but one that has hugely interested me since reading Cooked by Michel Pollen and more recently since meeting Professor Tim Spector at the School of Artisan Food. He gave a fascinating hour long talk about understanding the microbes in our own gut, keeping them well looked after and in turn improving our health, weight and mental well being.

The gut is the largest organ in our body and keeping the microbes it contains alive and flourishing affects all aspects of our well being. It helps us digest things easily, controls calories absorbed, provides vitamins and keeps our immune systems strong. Modern diets that are full of processed supermarket ready meals, factory farmed meat full of antibiotics and fatty fast foods is destroying our gut health and preventing us from feeling fit and protecting ourselves against illness and diseases.

I've learnt that a diverse range of real foods, cooked yourself; and especially live foods are all things our gut loves. It's all good really as live foods covers wine and cheese; as well as live yoghurts, fermented foods such as kimchi, pickled fruit and vegetables, olives, miso soup, aged cheeses, live beer, sauerkraut, keffir and kombucha. These things used to be much more prevalent in people's diets when fridges were none existent or a luxury, as people were frequently preserving fruit, veg, milk, grapes etc as a regular part of life.

This led to my interest in keffir, which is a fermented milky yoghurt drink, and also kombucha which is a fermented sweet tea drink that tastes a bit like apple juice. I would highly recommend giving either a go at home if you are interested, we have both on the go, and also recently added a big vat of kimchi to our fermented house pals. Small bottles of keffir or kombucha are pretty expensive in the shops, but you can produce litres at home for pence.

Kombucha is such a tasty, refreshing, beneficial drink. I've also been looking at using it in our menus; whilst in London I had a salad of kombucha plums, beetroot and goats curd at Brunswick House. It was totally delicious. Simply by adding fruit to your kombucha for a week, you can flavour the drink and also get tangy delicious fruit to use in salads or puddings as you wish.

This Kombucha tea recipe is pretty simple. I ordered my 'scoby' online, this is the live element which looks a bit like the contents of a petri dish, it's a bit weird! It was in a pouch with a little bit of kombucha liquid, already fermented, which gets your batch going. You simply brew a big batch of strong sugary tea, I used 2 litres of water, 7 tea bags and 170g of caster sugar. I've been using breakfast tea but am going to try out other types next, green and early grey I think. Leave the tea to brew for 30 minutes then remove the tea bags.

Kombucha doesn't like metal, so you now need to transfer the tea to something glass preferably, and stir with a plastic spoon if you need to. Once the tea is cold, combine the scoby and the tea in a big glass jar and then leave it to ferment, I cover the top of mine with some kitchen roll and an elastic band so it can get some air. It is ready when it no longer tastes of tea, the fermentation process feeds on the sugar so it is no longer sweet, almost like a tart apple juice, slightly cider like taste. Strain off the kombucha leaving behind the scoby and a cup of kombucha, then start the process again, brewing a new batch of tea.

At this stage you can flavour the kombucha you have removed. I like it as it comes, but you can add fruit, apples, oranges, plums, pears, ginger, herbs... for a week, the strain again and drink. You can use the fruit in salads or puddings too. My first batch took a month to ferment, but has since sped up to a couple of weeks as the scoby has settled in and grown a bit. It's a strange yet fascinating process! Feel free to get in touch with any tips or questions!

I love it, I'm also drinking as much as possible of it and my keffir at the moment, everyone around me has flu and I'm determined not to succumb. I'm armed with fermented fluids and a big bag of clementines!

Drinking Vinegar's or 'Shrubs'

I've come across drinking vinegars or 'shrubs' as they are known in a few places over the years, I think the first time was in Ducksoup in Soho, but I chose wine instead... They sparked my interest but I hadn't actually ever tried them, and added them to a long list of 'things to try out'.

I'm a fan of the sour, the pickle, anything sharp, whether it is in food or drinks, a sour beer or a sour cocktail, always gets my attention... I'll order food based on the presence of a caper sometimes, those little bursts of something sharp with a rich meat or a buttery sauce is the best balance in my mind. Fergus Henderson gives warning however; as much as you think you love the caper, don't overdo it - they should be discovered like a prize, the 'Ho! Ha! moment of surprise and delight' he calls it...

Making a shrub is similar to pickling, an old fashioned way of preserving fruit. Fruit mixed with vinegar then made into a syrup. I have seen it done the other way round where the fruit is macerated with sugar first, then mixed with vinegar, but I prefer the former. You have more control over the sweetness that way, and a more versatile product because the fruit vinegar is a delicious thing in its own right that can be used in salad dressings, braises and sauces, to name but a few...

The drink itself is great just with soda, a sharp drinking cordial. It seems odd to be drinking vinegar, but it's just a sharp kick the same as you would get from using citrus in a good punchy lemonade. It is also double great in a cocktail, I made a cherry shrub, elderflower cordial and gin fizz recently that was a summery gin delight!

Cherry was my first shrub experiment. I had a beautiful big box full and wasn't sure what to do with them all, I pickled some first off, these are really good with cheese or pates. Then set to making my first shrub. The good thing is that you can use fruit that's a bit on the turn too, so if something looks like it's a bit overripe or you're not going to use it up, just put it in a shrub...

Wash whatever fruit you are going to use. I stoned a load of big fat cherries, about half a big kilner jar full. Just tear them in half into a bowl, then mash them up either with your hands or a potato masher, crushing the flesh and getting all the juices moving. Add them to your jar and you want to add the same quantity of vinegar to fruit, roughly. I don't think you need to be super accurate with any of this. I used white wine vinegar this time round. Seal the jar and give it a good shake. Then leave for 1 to 2 weeks, giving it a shake every few days, you want the maximum amount of fruit flavour to come out as possible.

Then it is time to strain it and add sugar. You can strain it through a muslin cloth or through a sieve, it is fine if a bit of pulp stays in the mix, it's just down to preference. Then add sugar to taste. I have been adding about half as much sugar to liquid, some recipes say equal amounts, but I found this far too sweet, I want to taste the fruit, not just sugar. So if you have about a litre of fruit vinegar add about 500ml of caster sugar. You don't need any heat, just stir until it is dissolved. Then it is ready to use.

I have been using about 1 part shrub to 5 parts soda or water, or gin... But it is down to personal taste really. I would like to make some with some unpasteurised vinegar, this is a live fermentation and so full of probiotics and very good for you.

Since using the cherries I have also made a gooseberry shrub, with lovely fat gooseberries from the Ouseburn Farm. I also tried a Strawberry, Raspberry and Black Pepper one too, which is delicious with a warm spice from the pepper. Long before I started thinking about shrubs I also put some new pine shoots in to vinegar to flavour the vinegar, not thinking that it was the beginning of a drinking vinegar, I tried it recently and it'd delicious, but I'm aiming to leave the pine for at least 6 months as that was the original plan. Larger harder fruits or leaves can either be left much longer to break down, or there is a method of cooking them slightly first with spices, water and sugar, then adding vinegar. I'll give this method a go too and see which I prefer; regardless I'm a total drinking vinegar convert now, hope you feel the same...