'bucha baby!

I harvested my first batch of homemade kombucha! Harvest might not be the most appropriate word, but it just seems so fitting...

If you're not familiar with kombucha, here's the run-down: it's a fermented tea drink, made commonly with black tea but also with green and herb, that has live cultures and enzymes that are good for you.

But to make it you need a "scooby" or a "scoby" or a "mother" or a "baby" or a "bucha shroom," whatever you want to call it. I call it a "jellyfish" because don't know another way to describe it but to call it what it looks like: a jellyfish-mushroom. Really, it almost looks like an old slimy pancake sitting in the bottom of a trashcan filled with coffee grounds.

I don't know how you grow your own jellyfish. I got mine from some friends who didn't want to travel cross-country with it in their car. What happens with the jellyfish is that as you feed it the tea mixture during the fermentation, it grows. You can cut and peel as many layers depending on how big it gets. I could give several people layers of my scoby so that they could start their own kombucha batchs.

You've probably seen GT's Kombucha
in the grocery store. They have a bunch of great flavors. There's a few other pricey brands, too. This one decided to channel the wine look. I generally like ginger, but I'm a ginger fanatic. The guava is good too, and even GT's green one is delicious, although it takes the first bottle to realize it.

Kombucha smells like vinager and tastes like sour cider or vinger tang. I like ginger because it gives it something spicy to bite on.

Anyway, my batch is currently on the last third of fermentation... 2 weeks in the cupboard, and 1 week in the fridge for fizziness. This first batch is ginger, and I started a basil-mint for next month.
Even The Economist had an article on it.

Here's my set up. Boiling water, black tea, jellyfish... pretty easy, you just have to make sure it's all sterilized.

I don't know how to find time to do all this, but I also made a batch of homemade soy milk tonight, between watching the movie King of Kong: Fist Full of Quarters. Godo movie, good milk. I think tomorrow before work I'm going to grab a begal, a bottle of soy, and go to the garden.