Kombucha Juice

This is an instructable for a juicing recipe that involves fresh juice from fruits, vegetables and kombucha. There are two things you will need to taste this living drink, a juicer, and kombucha. If you've never juiced before I will walk you through the steps we take, from prepping the work station, ingredients, to juicing. If you're an experienced juicer, I encourage you to try your own recipe,  and mix it with kombucha.


                                                                    Table of Contents

1. Prepping the Kitchen
2. The Ingredients
3. Peel, Cut, or Chop Your Fruits!
4. Rinse and De-Stem Your Vegtables
5. Remove the Tops and Bottoms of Carrots and Celery
6. Setting up for Juicing
7. Juicing
8. Compost the Remaining Pulp
9. Pour the Kombucha
10. Add the Juice
11. Cleaning a Omega VRT400
12. Resources

Here is what a clean cutting board station may have for cutting, chopping, or peeling fruits and vegetables..
Make sure to organize your tools, and decide locations for cutting and juicing, prior to chopping and cleaning vegetables.

Recommended Tools for Cutting Board Station

-Cutting Board for chopping and cleaning vegetables
-Knives for cutting
-Apple Corer
-Compost Bin(To put into food waste)
-Ingredient Basket or Bowl

The juicing portion of this particular drink required these basic Ingredients to make...
-A Juicer!
-One bunch of Siberian Kale
-Two Medium-sized Carrots
-Two Medium-sized Apples
-A Stick of Celery
-One Lemon
-A Small bunch of Swiss chard
-A one-inch cube of Ginger

If you're looking for vegetables, I recommend you go to a local farmers market, or carefully hunt through your mother's garden for vegetables. The best tasting vegetables are fresh from a farmer or your own garden.

Depending on the Juicer you use, you may need to cut the ingredients into smaller pieces that can be processed.
For the Omega VRT400, we core our Apples and then chop them into smaller pieces.
Lemons are also chopped into smaller pieces. If you want a sweeter lemon flavor you can always keep the rinds on the lemon.

-Rinse leaves to remove dirt and insects
-Tear leaf matter away from stem
-Put stems into food waste
-Add to ingredient bowl


When eating vegetables from your own garden or a grocery store it is important to wash the leaves, to clean off any pesticides or insects.

Additionally, plants have different nutrients allocated to different areas of the plant. Stems and roots have more potassium/phosphorous while leaf's have more nitrogen. We de-stem our vegetables, to make it easier for both the juicer and our bodies to process!
We compost any leftover material to make sure the nutrients in the stem of the leaf are added back into our soil, and not forever lost in land fills.

 

-Remove the tops and bottoms of your Celery and Carrots
-Chop into more manageable pieces

What parts you keep, or compost, determines the flavor of your juice. If you're aiming for a smooth flavor remove the tops and roots of celery and carrots. And if you're feeling adventurous juice the entire carrot! 

-Move the ingredients next to juicer and get ready to juice!
After all the Ingredients are chopped up into manageable pieces for the juicer there is only one place left for those delicious vegetables..
The juicer!

-Carefully and slowly juice the ingredients

Any order you put the ingredients in the juicer is fine. If the juicer gets clogged add fibrous vegetables such as celery; often they will dislodge any pulp clogging the juicer.

-Put the leftover pulp into a compost bin for food waste

Once you've gone through all your Ingredients let the juicer run for two minutes to get any remaining juice out.
We add the pulp and all other waste vegetable/fruit waste to our food waste compost.

-Pour the Kombucha before adding the Juice

Kombucha is a probiotic drink derived from a yeast and bacteria culture. The bacteria inoculates your stomach reintroducing enzymes and bacteria to your stomach, encouraging a healthy digestive system. These same bacteria are revived from the sugar in the juice once added. 

The last step to try this drink is mixing the juice with the Kombucha. Personally, i find the interaction between the juice and kombucha extremely fun to watch and taste..
Here is a video of the wonderful reaction between the kombucha culture and juice.

Cleaning up properly ensures a clean juicer for your next batch of Kombucha Juice!
I recommend you clean your juicer, knives, and board immediately after you juice. You will need a soapy paper towel and a nylon brush.

   Cleaning the Juicer & Cutting Board

1. Disassemble the juicer
2. Rinse each part
3. Brush the metal screens with a nylon brush
4. Wipe smooth surfaces down with a wet soapy paper-towel
5. Rinse each part again
6. Leave juicer parts in a place to dry
7. Clean the cutting board and knives with a soapy paper towel
8. Rinse & leave to dry.

Here's a video of the steps.

The leaf, root, and fruits ingredients of this recipe can be altered to fit your personal taste and needs. The amount of fruits you use determines the sweetness, and the amount of leaves you use determines the amount of nutrients. I personally recommend having a large volume of leaves(kale, swiss chard) to fruits(apples, oranges). Any combination of juiced fruits and vegetables will leave you either glad to be alive, or wondering what you created for yourself.
Go experiment and explore the world of juicing with or without Kombucha.

Resources

-John: http://www.youtube.com/user/rawfoods

Thank you for your time and I hope you enjoy this special drink!