Kombucha

By: Mike McEnearney
From: Real Food by Mike
Makes: 3 litres
Photographer: Alan Benson

Kombucha has been called the elixir of life. It’s a probiotic drink made by fermenting green tea with sugar. If this is your first time making it, and you have no ‘scoby’ (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast), you need to grow your own from scratch by using a bottle of store-bought kombucha. This is done by fermenting the kombucha with water, sugar and tea, allowing the scoby to form naturally and grow thick and strong enough. When you remove it from the jar, you can start to make the drinking kombucha. Your first batch won’t be good to drink, but it will be suitable for the starter and scoby. Discard the rest. Your next batch, using the scoby and the starter you produced, will be ready to drink within about a month. (If you don’t have the patience to grow a scoby from scratch, as explained in this recipe, see if you can find one online or get one from a friend.) Kombucha is great served chilled at the beginning of the day to get your gut moving, and also great as a base for cocktails or for iceblocks.

Ingredients

Quantity	Ingredient
3.5 litres	hot water, but not boiling
230g	caster sugar
2 tablespoons	green tea leaves
500ml	kombucha, (buy a bottle from the health food store)

Method

Combine the hot water and sugar in a saucepan and stir until the sugar dissolves. Remove the pan from the heat, add the tea leaves to the sugar water and allow the tea to steep. Cool to room temperature. (This will probably take most of the day.)
Add the bottled kombucha to the cooled tea, then strain it into a jar, being careful not to let it touch any steel. Cover the jar tightly with muslin (cheesecloth) and secure with elastic bands, so the mixture can breathe. Leave the jar in a dark place for 10 days to 1 month, depending on the ambient temperature – the hotter the temperature, the faster it will ferment.
When it’s ready, the kombucha starter will taste slightly acidic and will have grown a scoby on top. You can now remove the scoby and split it in half to make double the kombucha, or give half the scoby to a friend.
Keep at least 500 ml of the liquid; you’ll use this starter, poured into a jar with your scoby, for your next batch of kombucha. Ferment it, as above. Strain the liquid into bottles and keep it in the refrigerator. Serve chilled.

Medicinal Benefit

Something of a ‘wonder’ drink, kombucha increases the good bacteria in the gut via the many probiotics, enzymes and acids it contains. One of these, glucaric acid, aids in liver detoxification. Compounds in kombucha called glucosamines help lubricate joints. Kombucha, extremely rich in antioxidants, is also thought to have antibiotic qualities.

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