Flaming Kombucha

It's been a while since I've written anything, because, hey, you probably don't want a narration of my classes or my work.  Things will get more interesting when it warms up again.

Meanwhile, tonight, after a somewhat rough weekend (6 hour homework stretch, then I went nuts and cleaned the apartment top to bottom... except the cat room), I decided I was going to make myself some candied kombucha scoby.

If you've never seen kombucha, it's a fermented tea drink.  It's somewhat tricky to keep going without killing it or yourself, but thankfully the temperatures and humidity around here are just about right for it to grow without going moldy.  So mine's been going since I moved here, and I tend to let it go a little too long.  This results in the scoby -- the bacterial mat that floats on top and does and the work* -- being very thick. 

That means you can scoop it out and candy it, which I'd never done.  So for some reason at 7:30 at night I decide I have to do this.  So I dig out the scoby (carefully -- I never touch the kombucha with my fingers if I can help it, to avoid contamination), slice it up with a steak knife (it's like cutting raw liver**), dump sugar on it, and start heating it up.

8 minutes later we have kombucha rockets.

Imagine chunks of candied fruit shooting two feet in the air trailing molten sugar.  Now imagine one of them smacking you in the hand.

Well, I watched the kombucha chunks shoot into the air from over by the sink, while running cold water over my hand and wondering how the heck I was going to get close enough to turn the stove off.   Meanwhile a napalm kombucha chunk hit the microwave and stuck. 

Eventually I managed to dive in and turn things off.  Even more eventually I got the floor cleaned up.  The stove still isn't as I'm waiting for the surface to be good and cold.  My hand is unhappy.  The remaining unexploded kombucha hunks are in the fridge.  Maybe tomorrow I'll try one.


*and now I'm sure I've made it so you never want to drink kombucha.  Ask me about hot dogs some time.

**see previous note