I’m surprised how many people still haven’t heard of kombucha. Granted, I worked in a health food store for ten years, so I definitely have had the “insider information” for a decade, but still, I think GT Kombucha came out around 2006/2007 and I know even regular grocery stores like HEB, Wegman’s, etc are carrying some brands of kombucha now.
Well, what is this drink? Before you run out and buy some I will warn you that store bought kombucha is an acquired taste. Unless you’re a freak like I am and you like to drink vinegar straight out of a bottle, you probably will not be excited after your first swig. It does taste a lot like apple cider vinegar mixed with whatever flavoring you choose to purchase. And what the heck is in there? There’s strands of something…it looks like of like…jellyfish???
Kombucha, known as jellyfish tea in Germany or mushroom tea in several Asian countries consists of a SCOBY, which Christine likes to refer to as a mushroom but actually stands for “symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast.” Now that I’ve got your mouth watering… 😀
You take this funny looking fungus and put it into sweetened unflavored tea and let it sit for over a week so that it ferments the tea, causing a bit of fizziness and a sweet sour taste. You can drink it like this (unflavored) or you can add flavoring to it and leave it out another 24-72 hours (be careful…it can explode!) to make it even fizzier before putting it in the fridge to consume cold. What a long process!
Why do this? Kombucha tea is thought to be very healthy. Many people swear it’s healed them of an assortment of ailments including:
-gut issues (it’s full of probiotics since it’s a fermented food)
-liver issues (well, at least in rats their liver toxicity levels decreased when consuming kombucha daily)
-eczema
-Type 2 Diabetes
-cancers (including the founder of GT Kombucha, who first noticed kombucha’s healing properties when his mother consumed it regularly and recovered from cancer)
-acne
and more. The sugar that is in the original batch gets eaten by the SCOBY, so it’s not got as much sugar as it did when you first put it all together. The caffeine is also reduced by 2/3 from what I understand.
Now, I’m not a tea drinker, not a coffee drinker, and not a soda drinker. I’ll have a cane sweetened soda once and while, but in general I stick to water, coconut water, apple cider vinegar water (yes, that has it’s own batch of healing properties), and green smoothies. One might think I’m a health freak until looking at the amount of chocolate I consume on a daily, almost hourly basis. It’s rather disturbing and is my one major addiction since I don’t drink, smoke, or do drugs. Some day I’ll stop eating it, especially because I’m on a mission to consume less foods that are shipped from out of the country. Saving the environment and all that… But hey, I’m still a work in progress.
Okay, so what does this magical mushroom tea taste like? When homemade, it tastes like soda. I mean, someone could choose to make it taste more like vinegar, like the store-bought kind, by just fermenting it longer than I did. But I’ll pass on that for now.
So here’s the process in pictures.
