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Fresh Fruit Kombucha (plum) — 10 Comments

  1. This sounds like a wonderful recipe. I’m curious if you reuse scobies that were grown in a batch along with fruit or if you do something else with them when the batch is done.

    • Brenda: I just chucked my fruit-melded SCOBY onto the compost pile and let a few billion bugs and microorganisms duke it out. Since this SCOBY already has some fruit in it, I’d consider taking smaller pieces of it and blending it in with other ingredients of a smoothie. Making kombucha jerky is another option and feeding it to your dog as a chew toy or nibbling on it yourself. The folks at HolisticSquid.com have a nice recipe for making Kombucha Jerky.

    • I’m not sure, Patty. I’d suggest putting a sign up at a local natural foods market. Shouldn’t be hard to find someone who would be happy to share. You could also just buy a fresh bottle of kombucha at the store and add it to your sweetened tea. A SCOBY should naturally begin to form on the surface within a few days, and will continue to thicken over time.

  2. I have put a punnet of strawberries and some extra sugar into a second fermentation. I left it for a few days in the big jar and then I bottled it. It was quite fizzy and utterly delicious in a few days. I left another lot for a bit too long and now have a strawberry flavoured vinegar for this Summer’s salads.

  3. yrs ago i had success using applejuice, boiled,strained,instead of sugar. made tea separately and combined. my last 2 batches of kombucha never got fizzy. i’d let it sit for a winter, then tried to get it going again. perhaps i should have repeated my batch attempts closer together. so, now that the apples are pressed, i will try it again with juice.(i would prefer not to buy sugar anymore, now that we can make juice.)

  4. I usually skip adding fruit to the 1F because it can interfere with competing bacteria. I would think adding some plum to a second ferment or simply skipping the 2F and adding some freshly juiced plum would work better, wouldn’t it? Then you could refrigerate and skip the second ferment thus avoiding the creation of any additional alcohol but enhancing the flavour profile all the same.

  5. Question: I was drinking kombucha for all of the touted benefits of probiotics etc.…Functional med Doctor told me that it’s just basically “sugar water”. Is that accurate? I thought the yeast ate up the sugar so it wasn’t present anymore… But apparently I am wrong according to him. Do you have thoughts on this? Thank you!

    • The fermentation process does consume much of the sugar, but there is sugar which remains, unless you ferment it an excessively long time. I’m not a scientist so don’t make claims as to probiotic health/benefits. My general sense is that without consuming fiber, the probiotics you may drink may not survive through your stomach and reach the intestines where they would provide more benefit. Fiber can serve as an effective “life raft” for probiotics to move through the digestive system.

      I drink kombucha mostly because I enjoy it!

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