Start thinking and looking at bread a little differently.
Like, what kind of drink could I make with that?
Hi, I'm Sharon Flynn.
I love fermenting things.
I thought you might like to learn how to make a simple
beer out of old bread.
Humans have been fermenting since, I think,
before we used fire.
Nearly everything we would eat, before we had refrigeration,
had an element of fermentation as a preservation technique.
Today we're making kvass.
There are as many recipes for kvass
as there are people making it because it's one of those drinks
that we've had passed down from history.
This one comes from Eastern Europe.
Rye kvass is what it's known to be, or dark bread kvass.
So what's so fabulous as well about wild fermentation
is that the bacteria and yeast
that we need to ferment with exists on us and in us
and on the vegetables and all around, actually.
So for this recipe, we don't add yeast from a packet.
I love using dark rye bread, that's traditional,
and it's because it has such a beautiful, nutty, deep rye flavour.
You really do need to put it in the oven to burn it
and burn it as much as you think you like the flavour.
I love burnt smoky flavours, so I like to use a barbecue.
All right, we've burnt the bread and it's cooled down,
so I'm going to pop it in the jar.
I'm just putting the figs, and I'm going to tear them up
because they tend to get quite puffy.
Some raw sugar, I've chosen really fine sugar
because it dissolves quite quickly.
This is raw honey from my own hive, actually.
But you don't have to use raw honey, but try and look out for it
because from raw honey
you can make beautiful sparkling mead as well.
Some orange peel.
Some leaves of mint.
Some delicious malt.
So at the moment, you might think that this jar
is too big for my brew, but
I need room for the the bread to puff up.
So in this jar, there’s going to be a series of life and death.
At first,
all life will exist, and we're going to add sugar
and they'll start to eat the sugar and be very happy.
But as they do, they're going to spit out
lactic acid bacteria and carbon dioxide.
Carbon dioxide is the fizz that we love.
Lactic acid bacteria is the lovely sour flavour.
With the bacteria that do that
some of them will find that the environment is too
acidic and they'll die.
And then the ones that love acid will proliferate
and it will kind of go like this for the whole journey.
Which is really lovely
and it's how we get our beautiful, complex flavours.
So this is not an exact science.
I can't tell you,
“It'll be ready in exactly four or five days”,
it might take longer.
It depends on the temperature in your home,
depends how much sugar you added,
depends how yeasty the bread was.
A lot of variables go into a wild ferment,
so you really do need to have that relationship with it.
Put it somewhere that you can see it.
Ideally, you wouldn't put it somewhere
where the sun hits really hard for 3 hours a day and then not.
The other thing is we need to keep it as an aerobic ferment.
Anaerobic would be like sauerkraut
where you have to stomp the air out
and you want to put a tight lid on.
This is aerobic, which means a cloth.
So how do you know when it's ready?
Well, you've got to stir it every day.
Ideally, you flip this up, give it a stir, taste it,
maybe even put a spoon in if you want to.
After four or five days,
even going like this, it should be effervescent.
But when you stir it, it'll start to froth.
And you will really, you'll see it's working.
OK, so it's one week later.
I've been checking in on this and stirring it every day.
It's bubbling happily along and I've had a little taste
and it's ready to strain.
I'm just going to tip it in here
and catch the bread.
I really want to get as much liquid out of the bread as possible,
so I like to just give it a squeeze and speed it up.
So now we’ve just got to get the liquid into the bottle.
I like using thick round glass that,
is strong enough to be heated if you need to.
I like to have a funnel.
Sometimes it's good to use a pour-over strainer.
We’re aiming for a clear-ish liquid
and you can see at the moment it's quite muddy,
but that will settle as the brew goes on.
So the fun part is flavouring it obviously.
I've ended up with
a little bit left.
This is not ideal.
In the case of having a little bit left,
you can either just sit and drink it,
put it in the fridge, now make it cold and enjoy it
when it's cold, it will probably be better.
Tastes like apple cider.
The reason you don't want to leave this to ferment
is it’s just too much air and it'll probably get a little bit of a
kahm yeast, which is ‘K-A-H-M’, you can look it up,
it's not dangerous, but it gives an unpleasant
mouthfeel and a little bitter flavour.
Well, it's sort of wintery flavours or hot cross bun flavours,
I would call them Christmas flavours right now.
But the orange and clove and cinnamon and star anise
are pretty lovely in this.
Be careful, you don't want to overpower it.
This recipe is just the basis.
From here you can spring off and add coffee beans
and vanilla and apricots, whatever flavour you imagine.
Now we're going to
close out all air and set it like this on the bench.
And there'll be a time, depending on what sugar you put in here,
but maybe within 24 hours, only,
that I'll pop this in the fridge to stop the fermentation
or really, really slow that down.
And as it sits in the fridge,
it'll get clearer and clearer and clearer
and you'll have solids at the bottom and clear at the top.
So there you go.
Probably the easiest beer you could make - kvass.
Save your bread and make some.
Cheers!