Violet And Vanilla Kombucha

Recipe by Luke Jefford

Wild Larder

Wild kombuchas are an essential part of our foraging larder. The deeper you delve in to the world of foraging, the more it becomes about preservation of flavour. Leaving a kombucha to acidulate in to vinegar is a quick and easy way to help preserve those foraged goodies.

In our opinion the lower levels of acetic acid in Kombucha vinegar helps the base flavour to shine through. We also never use tea in our flavoured kombucha to really help those flavours shine through. No tea in a kombucha I hear you say?

What is kombucha?

In a nut shell, Kombucha is a fermented tea drink. A brewed tea with the addition of sugar is left to ferment along with a SCOBY. A SCOBY, or Mushroom as its sometimes called, is an ‘symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast’. It basically helps turn those sugars in to a very low alcoholic & acidic beverage packed with natural gut helping flora.

We’ve been unable to find much information on why our method of fermentation without tea works. Usually one would do a second ferment, with an additional flavour, after the original tea ferment is made. Everything we’ve read says kombucha requires the tannins in tea to help the correct bacteria ferment. Our scooby is on its 18th ferment without the addition of tea. We do wonder if the bacterial makeup of our SCOBY has changed all together? As we learn more about this, we’ll update the page.

tips for making kombucha…

• Weighing down your SCOBY at the bottom of your ferment will aid in a new one forming. It also takes on whatever colour kombucha your fermenting. We use some santisied rocks we collected from the beach. Whatever you choose, make sure it’s been properly cleaned and steamed.

• We’ve got many stories of bad batches of ferments from plastics. We’d 100% recommend using glass or ceramics. Though, glass is much more visually appealing as you watch your SCOBY grow.

• A quick way to ruin your kombucha is by not allowing your liquid to completely cool before combining it with the SCOBY. Be patient and give it time to cool down to an ambient temprature first.

• We do have some horrific stories of carbonisation taking place in the fridge and ultimately explosions. A fermenters right of passage! Make sure if you’re bottling to regularly check your kombucha for build of air, as they will and can explode if your not taking it to vinegar stage.

• Make sure to use fair trade and organic sugar. Not just for your new love child (SCOBY), but for the planet too ;)

• When testing the taste of your kombucha, use a santisied tea spoon and gently press against the side of the SCOBY to collect a sample. There’s nothing more disturbing than watching your beloved SCOBY sinking to the bottom of the glass. Don’t be heavy handed. You could use a straw too.

• If using water from the tap, at least boil it first. We usually boil and put through a Brita filter to filter out any metals and chlorine. Chlorine will kill the good bacteria in your SCOBY.

• Leave in a place out of direct sunlight and with good airflow.

Don’t Leave it too long…

Finding the sweet spot in length of time to ferment, is really important. We recently did a fig leaf kombucha which was left to acidulate in to vinegar. It was tasting sublime! We left it for another couple of weeks before bottling, purely out of curiosity of how the flavour would develop. During this time the vinegar had become bitter. Using your tastebuds is really important to ascertain when to bottle. If you’re planning a drink, roughly 7 days should be good. If you’re planning on vinegar, taste regularly, it’s going to take much longer though, at least a month.

If you have any questions about making your own Kombucha, feel free to drop us a message

Ingredients

• 200g Granulated White Sugar

• 1L Filtered Water

• 2 Tbsp Vanilla Bean Paste

• 230 Sweet Violet Flowers

• 1 Kombucha Scooby

Method

It is really important to make sure all of your utensils are sterilised before starting.

Step 1

Firstly your obviously going to need to pick all of those flowers from nature. 230 seems like a lot. But we managed to easily pick these within 1 hour from different spots, whilst barely touching the populations at those sites.

Step 2

Now comes the tedious part. You need to pick all the petals from the flower. If any green parts are present, they are going to taint your ferment brown. We absolutely don’t want that to happen. Just those beautiful purple petals!

Step 3

Once this is done. Pop your water, sugar and vanilla in a pan and bring to the boil. Take off of the heat and leave for 30 minutes before adding your sweet violet petals.

Step 4

Leave for 24 hours for those flavours to infuse.

Step 5

The next day bring the mixture up to 60c in a bain-marie (or double boiler) and blend the mixture together. Using an electrical device of your choosing. Leave the mixture again at room temperature for 24 hours.

Step 6

Once this time has passed. Pass the mixture through a fine sieve (you could strain through a cheesecloth for extra clarity if you wanted to). Pop in to a glass jar thats big enough to hold your mixture.

Step 7

Add in your kombucha SCOBY and leave the lid open for the ferment to start its thing. It’s important when making kombucha not to seal the container as it needs oxygen to do its thing. You could cover with cheesecloth if you’re concerned about critters. They do have the potential to add in nasty bacteria so its best to cover with something breathable. We prefer to weigh our scooby down with something santised at the bottom of the glass as a new coloured scooby will form on top.

Step 8

After a couple of weeks pop in to bottles and store in the fridge. It is important to taste the mixture every day after one week until you’ve reached the perfect balance of sweetness and acidity.

NOTES

IF you wanted to, you could leave the kombucha to turn in to vinegar by letting it sit for 6+ weeks.