Your permission to play with food
Your permission to play with food
Make your own craft soda
Yup, that’s right. You’ve read that subject line correctly. I’m giving you the permission to play with food. I know what we’ve been told as children. But as adults we now are responsible for our own lives. So we might as well play and have fun with food.
I’ve always been a very curious person. But not in every aspect of my life am I as experimental and open to try something new than with food.
Traveling to a new country? Give me all the local specialties. Staying with different people in a community? Have them share their wisdom with me. Come across an inspiring recipe? Let’s dig in and play.
Somehow experimenting with food doesn’t feel as risky to me. Even when things don’t work out, it’s just me who might end up eating or drinking what went wrong or even tossing it all together. No one will ever know or even care.
Staying with a couple in Vermont in 2022 and 2023 I got into making Kombucha, learned the process from them and eventually was able to make several batches on my own. They pretty much stuck with the same recipe for years of keeping it as simple as possible, that is not adding anything for a 2nd fermentation after the SCOBI had done its job.
I do know that many people out there experimenting with Kombucha are adding fruits, herbs, spices and all sorts of things to the bottles for another round of fermenting after the SCOBI had been taken out. I didn’t get to do that, yet.
At the same place I’ve tasted Jun, a fermented beverage similar to Kombucha, but using honey instead of sugar. The person making it obviously had a lot of fun with it. It tasted just incredibly flavorful.
And I took part in making a big batch of mead using red currants, lemon verbena and raspberry leaves. You should’ve seen the color of this mead when we bottled it after six weeks. The most gorgeous pink I’ve ever seen.
Wild fermented beverages
This year, with a big gap in between, though, seems to be a year for playing with fermented beverages for me. In the spring I attended an online event with fermentation guru Sandor Katz and got introduced to making Tepache, a Mexican fermented beverage using pineapple peel, and ginger beer.
Alas, the latter failed on me. Having not read the instructions for the recipe properly beforehand I ended up with nothing happening with my ginger bug, the starter to making ginger beer. And I didn’t actually get back to it and started all over, but gave up the attempt of making ginger beer at the time.
What stuck with me, though, was a sentence that Sandor mentioned in his webinar.
He basically said, that with wild fermentation using fruits, herbs, spices, etc., you actually cannot do anything wrong. Simply add those ingredients to water and let it sit and ferment over a short period of time and see where it goes. Experiment, play, have fun!
When I came across the wild fermented soda recipe that inspired me to make my sea buckthorn soda a couple weeks ago, I remembered Sandor’s words.
Especially after the bottles of two very different sodas - I had made one with sage and apple cider vinegar and one with rosemary and lemon juice - turned out like such a special treat, I gave myself the permission to do that again. Making more wild fermented soda.
The first two batches using the sea buckthorn I stuck to the recipe, because I wasn’t sure, how they would turn out. I was even afraid they’d end up being super sour, since sea buckthorn usually is quite sour. But they turned out quite delicious, especially the one with lemon juice and rosemary. Such a great flavor combo. And the color!!!
So this week I started making another two batches. I had pomegranate and persimmon in my kitchen, lemon and ginger anyway, so I started making two very different sodas, one with pomegranate and lemon peel, lemon juice and honey, of course. The other one with persimmon, ginger, lemon juice and honey.
No apple cider vinegar this time, I didn’t really like the flavor in the sea buckthorn soda. It was too vinegary for my taste.
This time I did not use a recipe at all. Scary? No, not at all. I’m confident that it’ll turn out just fine. Remember, you can’t do anything wrong when making wild fermented sodas.
With that being said, while I’m writing these lines, the two bottles are sitting on the table next to me for the past two days. I have no clue how they will turn out. I’ll probably let them sit another day or even two, then strain and let sit another couple days for the second fermentation, which will add some additional bubbles.
You can’t imagine how excited I was when making the first batch using sea buckthorn, when I saw how fizzy it was. I felt like a small child again who discovered something really fun.
So yeah, this is your official permission, if you ever needed one, to start playing with what you got at home, fruits, herbs, spices. I’d not suggest using apples, though. I believe the pectin in the fruit isn’t beneficial for the fermentation. But then again, I haven’t tried it, yet.
By the way, I’ll be interviewing another guru, at least in the Vermont area, when it comes to craft sodas and seltzer, for my series This is my craft this coming week. I’m very excited to learn more from and about Jess Messer of Savouré.
Have you ever made fermented beverages before? I’m very curious to know about your experiments!