fermented foods - The Bridge Cottage

Kombucha Brewing

Kombucha Brewing

I first stumbled across kombucha, that lightly fermented fizzy drink made from sugar and tea, and a culture called a scoby (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast) when in November 2019 I gave up booze and was looking for a grown-up drink that wasn’t sweet and sickly and didn’t cost a fortune.

Not that you have to have given up alcohol to enjoy drinking kombucha. Kombucha has health benefits all of its own.

Rather than type out their words and risk being accused of plagiarism, here is a post from those good folk at BBC Good Food, sharing some of the alleged health benefits of drinking kombucha.

Health Benefits of Kombucha

Not being prepared to part with large sums of money for shop-bought kombucha, I set about learning to make my own.

I am sure there are far better guides to making your own kombucha that the one I am going to share with you. When I started, I went to The Happy Pear, a jolly couple of lads from Ireland who are both pleasing to the eye and full of sound advice about healthy living. I watched their YouTube video and it told me all I needed to know.

The Happy Pear Kombucha Brewing Video

However, here is how I brew it.

FIRST FERMENT

You will need:

Kombucha Brewing – A scoby floating in the brew,

A Scoby – Symbiotic Culture of Bacteria and Yeast. This is the being that floats or bobs about, doing its magic to turn sweetened tea into kombucha. With each new batch a new baby scoby is formed, so if you know someone already who brews their own kombucha, then see if they have a baby scoby you can adopt.
Failing that, head online – I got mine from Happy Kombucha who also do starter kits, have full instructions and guides and are generous with their advice.

Tea: You then need cooled, fermented tea. Green tea or black tea – take your pick. I like the freshness of taste that comes with green tea kombucha and like to think it is even healthier. use four tea bags or two tablespoons tea. Use around 2 litres boiled water to make your tea.

If you have a filter jug, kombucha prefers filtered water or spring water – but don’t go buying plastic bottles!! We don’t want any more non disposable plastic in the world.

Sugar: 150g – 180g granulated sugar.

Add sugar to the tea – don’t worry, the sugar is fermented out!

So, brew up a batch of tea and sugar and leave to cool.

Wide Necked Jar: Without squeezing the tea bags, drain your cold tea into a wide necked jar. I’m using these wide necked glass jars that I got from a local delicatessen – they were olive jars.

Top us with cooled water.

Another word of warning – scobies don’t like metal – so don’t strain your tea through a metal sieve or stir with a metal spoon. I’ve found a cotton cloth bag bought for straining nuts of making vegan milk to be great. I got mine from Amazon, but other sellers are available I’m sure. I even take off my rings to be extra kind.

Kombucha Brewing

Then lower your scoby along with around 200ml starter liquid from a previous batch or the liquid your scoby arrived with. Wish him happy brewing, cover and leave in a warmish place for around 10 days.

SECOND FERMENT

Kombucha Brewing – second ferment

You should by now have a healthy-looking white rubbery crust on top of your kombucha. Congratulations, you have made a kombucha baby! This can be popped into a scoby nursery with some of the fermented liquid, passed on to a friend or put on the compost heap. We have a septic tank here, and I like to think that if kombucha keeps my gut healthy then maybe it will do the same for the septic tank. But how can we flush our babies down the loo? Give it a new home, and encourage your friends to take up kombucha brewing too.

Pressure Bottles Into sterilised pressure bottles – like the ones Grolsh use for beer – the ones with metal swing tops. Add a tsp of sugar ( I find coconut sugar works well) and any flavouring you want to add. You can leave it plain, but the addition of some natural flavouring can be fun. As we’re huge fans of seasonal eating, we make this depending on what’s available.

Lime and ginger to flavour kombucha in the second ferment

Flavouring Strips of ginger or lime/lemon zest work well, apple slices or fresh raspberries or blackberries too. – experiment and let us know on social media what you prefer.Now, siphon your kombucha through the nut bag and into a jug, then pour it into your sterilised bottles, making sure any fluid used for sterilising is rinsed away. Leave for another week.

There are two schools of thought on burping. Some burp and some don’t. It depends on how much fizz you want. If you don’t release the pressure, make sure you open your kombucha over the sink.

Then store it in the fridge! This should arrest the fermenting process but still open with caution.

Enjoy the taste, health benefits & sustainability of your home-brewed kombucha.

Kombucha Brewing – the outtake

Now for the outtake! It’s not easy pouring kombucha with one hand whilst taking a photo with the other. Note to self – use a tripod and camera timer!!

In case you’re wondering if I’m still totally alcohol-free? No. I gave up for just shy of a year, and during that time, reset my relationship with booze, but when Tim sold his accountancy business and retired, I shared a bottle of very decent red wine with him and I do still love a gin and tonic!

For other posts on fermented food and seasonal eating, head back to the kitchen, or why not pop into the garden to see what’s growing or what jobs can be done?

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To follow Sue’s writing journey and hear about other published work, her debut, The Rewilding of Molly McFLynn and other writing, sign up to Sue Reed Writes on Substack or hunt her out on her social media and website of that name.

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Ring of Fire Chillies

Are you a fan of hot chilli sauce? Do you grow chillies? Here at Bridge Cottage we make our own fermented hot chilli sauce which has no nasty additives, is sugar-free, great for your gut health and very easy to make. If that wasn’t enough, you’ll be producing food at home, without lining the coffers of the big food corporations who push their plastic-wrapped, shipped foods full of additives, preservatives and goodness knows what. Sure, it takes a bit of time and effort, but isn’t that worth it in the grand scheme of things?

There are other ways to preserve chillies: they freeze well, and a bag of frozen chillies will keep well all year round, ready to pluck from the freezer when a recipe calls for a whole chilli. Dried chillies are great too, chopped finely for chilli flakes, and keep well in a jar in the spice cupboard, but by far the most popular method of using chillies here at Bridge Cottage is by making fermented chilli sauce.

saving chilli seeds

It’s early autumn now and the chillies have ripened in the greenhouse. Time to pick them and freeze a few but use most of them for a handy hot chilli sauce which is incredibly easy to make. (Don’t forget to split open a couple of your favourites, dry and save the seeds for next year).

Bridge Cottage Fermented Hot Chilli Sauce

You will need:

A large glass jar with a screw top lid

A circle of plastic cut from the lid of a plastic tub

Water

Salt

Chillies

Ginger

Garlic

Fermented hot chilli sauce

Wash them and pack your jar with whole chillies, a couple of cloves of garlic and a couple of chunks of root ginger.

Add water so the chillies are all covered.

Pour out the water into a jug and add 4% salt – weigh the empty jug first, then weigh the water and add 4% of the water’s weight in salt. Dissolve the salt then our back over the chillies.

Fermented hot chilli sauce

Place a disc of plastic over the chillies – this is important and is to ensure all the chillies are kept submerged. This is anaerobic fermentation, meaning starved of oxygen. Alcohol and pickles are made this way and the airtight condition creates ethanol and lactic acid. The addition of salt is important as it raises the acidity and to cut a long story short, prevents you from catching botulism.

Place the lid on the jar and leave somewhere reasonably warm.

Your chillies will soon start to ferment, so once bubbles appear, it is important to ‘burp’ them every day to release the gas. You don’t want an exploding jar of chillies up your wall. This is done by carefully unscrewing the lid and allowing the gas to escape. There’s nowt worse than trapped wind!

Screw the lid back on, and burp daily til the bubbles stop. You can leave them like this for as long as you want. Some people leave them for months. We tend to wait til they have stopped fizzing and then move on to the next stage and make the sauce.

Strain the contents, making sure to reserve some of the liquid.

Put into a food processor and blitz.

BE CAREFUL – YOU NOW HAVE THE EQUIVALENT OF PEPPER SPRAY.

If it is too thick, add a dash of the reserved liquid, and pour it into sterilised screw-top glass bottles.

Here is a timely reminder to never throw glass bottles away. We like to bottle our chilli sauce in small bottles and give some away as gifts.

It is important to remember with fermented sauces that they are live. You will need to loosen the lids from time to time to let the gas escape.

Fermented Chilli Sauce

Once opened, we keep a bottle in the fridge and add a dash to soups, stews and curries. A Sunday morning breakfast of smashed avocado on toast with grated lime zest and a dash of chilli sauce is divine. Non-vegans can add a poached egg.

I’ll be writing more on fermenting foods in due course, but in the meantime if you want to find out more and get some fabulous recipes, look no further than the River Cottage Handbook No. 18. Fermentation by Rachel de Thample.

It’s October as I write this, and we’re saving seeds for planting out next year, chillies being the first crop that gets sown in the greenhouse in the New Year.

Growing chillies

This old photo did make me laugh! How earnest did I look? It was taken for the old Bridge Cottage Way blog I first started on BlogSpot over ten years ago when I left teaching, (but it no longer exists) and harks back to my Woolly Pedlar days when I make clothing from recycled knitwear. I also dyed my hair back then, but now embrace the grey, having ditched the need to try and look younger. I’ll make sure there’s a post on growing chillies in good time for the new growing season over in the Bridge Cottage Garden section of this new website.

October in the veggie garden

I’d better get this article finished and published, and go and join Tim, who is outside in the veggie plot planting out winter kale and getting sections ready for garlic and onions which can go in any day now.

The seasons are rolling on, and there’s always something to do here at Bridge Cottage.

We still haven’t finished making apple juice, chutney or jams jellies.

Autumn’s Bounty: Apples.

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You might enjoy some of the writing and ideas in other sections of this website, as we look towards leading more sustainable lives by growing our own food and creating dishes in line with seasonal eating, or head to our handy ‘Month by Month’ guides to find out what we have been doing here at Bridge Cottage as the months go by:

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Tag Archive for: fermented foods

Kombucha Brewing

Make Your Own Fermented Hot Chilli Sauce