How to Brew Your Own Kombucha with Brad | It's Alive | Bon Appetit

and I really just want oh God, oh God, no cuts, cuts in the trash can. Oh tragedy, this is

your

first time making food, it sure looks like this, so here we have a nice close up of a Viscomi or the mother and this is the light. this is the force behind making

kombucha

, we're going to feed the Scoby a little bit more to make the

kombucha

, so we feed it sugar and tea and the ratio that was passed on to me, the master formula, is for one liter of water that you had. 70 grams of sugar and 7 grams of tea, we're doing the batch 10 times, so 700 grams of sugar 70 grams of tea, so we'll start with the sugar, that's a lot of sugar.

I mean, we're not going to stop here, but again. the final product is actually quite dry because the scoby eats the sugar. I'm going to make a nice green tea like powdered gum and for 70 grams I'll use 68 green and 10 grams of black, so pinch it, good luck then. From there, that's it, so this is a four times ten recipe. The water is already boiling. I turn it off. We add this and stir it. We let the sugar dissolve. You don't want to overdo it. Just let it soak. It's like you're practically ready. making sweet tea, so while it steeps we'll take a look at the girls here.

I have 4 different containers, okay this is the scoby, it's layered almost like you can get up close and look at it, it's almost layered like a large laminated cookie. I could peel the layers where I can start peeling layers and I can give it to a friend and he can do it at home. Okay, he stops wasting time and gets back to business here, so I bought some cheesecloth. Okay, a wonderful line of products that in the fine mesh Chinua and then we strain it into another container for a couple more minutes from time to time and then refrigerate it.

What I do is use a little less water and then add some ice cubes to help. cool it down and it will also speed up the cooling process, okay we'll put this in the sink, okay this goes here so it's mine, well you didn't order it, I don't think you ordered it, please take this. Oh, Vinny, my witness cameraman doesn't miss anything classic. I ordered it where is it?, but he never ordered it. Today's crazy, whoa whoa, pg-13 or finish a family show since the days have been so busy, haven't you been able to release the pressure?

It shouldn't look so messy here, usually this will all be unpacked, but Vinnie and I, except Benny, haven't been able to do that yet, so it might have to wait until tomorrow because we have boots to come. We've got a nice steep one right behind you, Claire, so again, a Chinua fine mesh strainer and some cheesecloth. Okay, that's Scobie, the food man, we're going to have a couple of stocking girls there, so from here he remembers that he was saying I cheated on the water. a little bit say I needed 10 quarts I only put in 8 so we can put in some ice cubes to help cool it down so we can do this a little faster science science yeah we're gonna put this right in the water it never ends so here we go it comes abruptly Dangerous Chris Morocco is on fire so we'll wait until it gets to about 72 degrees and then we'll do the old siphon on the scopes, you don't need to yearn for this man, you're cheating, I had to keep him on the walk-in and now I just do it we're getting up to temperature and then once you know, we still want to shock him if it's too cold, you can shock him if it's too hot, it can kill him. so we'll take him to where he is and that's all well and good and then we'll feed them, so Stan Whitley friends, that's it.

I'm sure there are much more sophisticated ways to do this. I don't have those that we have. You will only use

your

own gravity to do this for us. I have that little siphon hose and I have you want to make sure you're in Brad's world, okay, look, wait for this, oh, there's no free rides, there's no free lunch there. In Brad's world you see that little hole there try to hide it down there oh wait I lied don't do that yeah oh my god boom right there we don't need you anymore and I'm out I'm out so good We filled this to the top then we'll do this to make them all and then that's it, and then it's a game of tasting until it gets too sweet, the perfect point, the balance between sour and sweet, and then from here it's just that you taste it every day, like this that I keep a straw.

I slide it down here, come in here, take this Vinny. I slide it down on the side, just a little bit of pinch because he was very sour here just because he's been hanging. and there we would not have had time to feed them. This will probably happen very quickly. I'll let it go probably because it's today, Wednesday, Friday. I'll probably bottle it right, so the next step is a very sophisticated tool, Kolb's best in the business, but. You don't want to touch that with your hands either. The bacteria on your hands is very bad. I am there?

Now you want to make sure your tea is still a little sweet, not completely sour. Very important for the second fermentation. You see, I only filled it a little, but I have several containers and I would like to do that. I like to do a mix of all of them because one might be a little bit more acidic than the other and I really just want to, oh gosh, oh. Gosh, okay, I think you said you always want to leave some for mom because she needs it, so yeah, you want to use a bottle that you can seal really well.

I like to use the square ones, they're not that good, you have some of them. You have to be careful, you have to get ones that are suitable for food use and for fermentation, because what we are going to do next is put this tea in these bottles with some juice with fruit juice and it will have a side effect. fermentation and it will start to carbonate and build pressure so if you have a really cheap or poorly poured glass bottle it can explode and you have this. It is important that it is on a label and be sure to make it known.

You remember which flavor you choose and you can. You have to date it so you can keep track of how long it takes to do the double fermentation. Oh yeah, I have some really nice fresh grapes in heaven and I gave them juice and we're going to try to make a kombucha with that. Now I like to use a lot of pre-packaged bottled juices, they are pasteurized so they are dead, but they tasted good and they have sugar. which is the most important thing when you make your own it carbonates a lot faster because it's just raring to go so yeah like I said you know this isn't rocket surgery so I don't really extol everything you know.

It's not a really big measure, so that's what we do, we'll call it should oh, I like that. I like to think of little names, you know, I'm very creative, so this is apricot. I just write apricot and then you can mix them together. until you can really put anything in it, we've prepared the fresh berries, we squeeze them and they come out fantastic, so let's bottle a few real quick to see where we are at, so yeah, I bought my big old bottle and jug and then just fill them up , you want to go, well, you have to go, you have to leave a little bit of air in there to try to let those little bubbles settle and then I'll come back and top it off, but you want to fill it up. up to here and then that's it, you seal it, you want to have this dog very tight, it has to be airtight like a frog's ass, airtight, you can use just regular wine corks, but these seem to work very well, we can keep reusing them.

You have to push them pretty good as far as they go, wait, that's what they wait. I was going to set a date. I waited about four days and then I didn't open it. You know, just let it go. Some patience. you start to fall off, the boots don't like to be bothered, you just have to let it do its job, so yes, you add all that juice, but when it's ready it's not very sweet because the living organisms, the microorganisms that are inside from here they eat sugar and produce carbon dioxide. science, so that's it, Brad's boot, oh god, this is going to get me fired, oh, we have a successful carbonation, look at that, oh, that's a beautiful thing.