Saturday, March 10, 2012

Kombucha Egg

This morning two long running experiments came together fortuitiously. First there is komucha. I have tasted many that were positively vile with seaweed and other garbage. Then others that just tasted like fruity vinegar. But I imagined just a sweet tea kind of komucha would be lovely. So I just made some black tea with sugar and threw in a disk of vinegar mother to see what might happen. Three weeks later it is perfectly delightful. Tart tea vinegar. Not effervescent, maybe because I left the lid off? But then it occured to me, if this is really just vinegar why not throw in some hardboiled eggs and see what happens? I didn't salt it, but maybe should have. We shall see. If it works, maybe vegetables would pickle nicely in it too. Does anyone have experience with this?

3 comments:

Bryan D. Bertsch said...

No experience with eggs, but keep me posted! If you want effervescent kombucha, you need to do a "second ferment" in which you add some fruit juice at bottling and let sit out, capped for 3-21 days.

Ken Albala said...

Ah, that explains it. My coauthor Rosanna is the expert on kombucha, which is how it made it into our cookbooks, but I've never tried it. Fruit juice. Thanks Bryan.

shell7324 said...

when i ferment veggies, mostly cabbage, carrot. i sometimes add a tbsp of either whey, kombucha, or kefir. i also make sure i add salt of course.