Dipping my toe into Fruit Kvass

In her blog, Kitchen Counter Culture Annie Levy does things with food that quite frankly scare me! I’m talking lacto-fermentation, which although I appreciate in theory, I have not yet felt confident enough to step outside my comfort zone and attempt to do myself – not until I read this blog post about creating your own homemade fizzy fruit drinks, called fruit kvass. It sounded straightforward enough, and I do tend allow a certain percentage of my fruit to go overripe and wasted – I’m not proud of this wastage, but now that I seem to have found a solution to my problem quite excited to experiment – and I found I had plenty lying around to experiment with.

Rhubarb, Raspberry and Orange

As I write this I’m sipping on my grape, strawberry and peach concoction, I don’t add much sugar to my kvass (can I still call it that?), maybe a splash of apple concentrate or a drizzle of fruit syrup or juice, so they don’t really fizz – but I’m happy with the results so far. Honestly the fruits in its whole form I used in this combination were going nowhere fast, because I hate the wastage they have to be really completely inedible before I will actually throw them away, so happily they were all salvagable in their sorry looking condition, and the results are really very acceptable – fresh, fruity and just sweet enough.

I read a bit more into the process on Rebecca Woods blog post, suggested by Annie, which indeed proves helpful however, and I have to wonder if I would have even bothered to add the peach had I read this post previously, so the lesson there is to go ahead and try anyway, there is nothing to loose – certainly nothing regretable as overripe fruit has little else use. And the results (so far) are delicious.

My most recent experiment was with a pear, to which I added no sugar but on day 2 I found the flavour was a bit weak so I added juice from some defrosted blackberries (using up the last of my frozen fruit now, in anticipation of the harvest to come). Reading Annies most recent post on DIY pear soda I will, in future crush the fruit, – it’s a small point, but I hope to get a better flavour as a result. I’m not bothered by a few bits floating in my drinks – owning neither funnel nor seive yet, it all gets a bit messy at times. I wasn’t overly keen on the result – I suspect it had gone further down the route of fermentation, but it’s all facinating, and most importantly easy.