Adventures with Beverages: Kvass, Carbonated Pickle Juice, and Ginger Ale

The bread kvass was a success, so my
experimentation with this beverage continues.

It’s Monday. We had some beautiful, warm days last week, but the weather has returned to gray and rainy. I don’t know about you, but my energy and mood tend to tank on gray, gloomy days. After the last couple of years of drought and terrible fires, I know we need the rain. My head knows, anyway, and I keep repeating the mantra: We need the rain. We need the rain. We need the rain. Still, I would rather have sunny, warm weather to make me feel cheerful and motivated.

My son doesn’t seem affected. He has been talking nonstop since first thing this morning—mostly energetic nonsense that feels more like noise than conversation. That alone makes me feel ready to crawl back into bed and pull the covers over my head.

I did promise I would report back on the bread kvass, though. I tested it last Tuesday and…

It. Was. Amazing.

I have to admit that I didn’t have really high hopes after tasting the carrot kvass, but the bread kvass exceeded my expectations. It was pleasantly sweet, but not overwhelmingly so, and the light carbonation gave it the perfect little sparkle. It’s actually something I might be tempted to overindulge in.

(There is a caveat here. My husband likes the bread kvass, and my son said, “I didn’t know bread juice could taste so good.” My daughters, however, think it’s nasty and refuse to drink it. Perhaps it’s an acquired taste.)

It was all about fermentation in our kitchen last week.
It was also deja vu all over again as we tried to find creative uses for the sourdough
starter discard--like sourdough pancakes and sourdough chocolate chip cookies.

Given the debatable success of the bread kvass, I tried to redeem my second batch of carrot kvass. Adding sugar and sourdough starter turned it into something slightly more drinkable, but it’s still too salty to be enjoyable. I left a small bottle out a day longer than the rest of it, just to see what happened. That bottle developed amazing carbonation but lost some sweetness, so it still tasted like carbonated pickle juice. I officially consider that carrot-ginger-orange kvass a failure.

Without a viable sourdough starter, yogurt and
baker's yeast will have to pinch-hit for the natural yeasts.

Since I had such success with the bread kvass, though, I decided to give it another go. It would have been more frugal and way more authentic to make my own rye sourdough starter and rye bread, but I was impatient, so I bought highly authentic dark rye bread at Walmart. The flaw in my plan turned out to be my sourdough starter. After tending it like a baby the first few days, I neglected it for a few more days. It had not only separated, which is normal, but had developed a gross and questionable film over the liquid. I dumped it and will have to begin again with my starter.

This jar of fermenting rye bread kvass looks like a hot mess,
but I'm hoping the result will be something wonderful.

Since I now lack a sourdough starter, I used a combination of plain yogurt and a pinch of yeast to replace it in the kvass recipe. I also used my own raw honey instead of sugar, boiled with water and orange peel. I combined all that with the toasted rye bread. Hopefully the result will be as tasty as the last batch of bread kvass.

Hopefully these ingredients are part of the recipe for success in 
homemade ginger ale.

Since I was already in the kitchen messing with fermentation, I also carried through with a promise I’d made to my youngest daughter. Several weeks ago, I had told her I would make homemade ginger ale. If you Google homemade ginger ale, you’ll find a variety of recipes, most requiring club soda or CO². I, however, was in search of the old-fashioned method to create the pop/soda version using yeast. I found it, of all places, on WikiHow. I used the traditional, non-cooked method requiring only sugar, yeast, ginger root, lemon, and water. We’ll see how it turns out.

Kvass and home-fermented ginger ale. Am I going too far?

Beyond that, I’m still finding it difficult to motivate myself for the day. The kiddos may be getting microwaved taquitos for lunch--with a side of kvass, of course.