I love fermentation. It is at the soul of the best foods in the world. Chocolate, bread, and wine. Kim chi, pickles, yogurt, buttermilk, and cheese. And lots of other stuff. I’ve made some of these things, and I’ve always enjoyed waiting with anticipation while the flavors build over hours or days.

But chocolate, bread, and wine do not look like this when the fermentation process is going well:

This is my Kombucha tea, and I’m scared of it. In a couple days, I’m supposed to drink it.

It’s called Kombucha tea, but it’s not really tea. It started as tea 4 days ago. Then I added a bunch of sugar, cooled it to room temperature, put it in a sanitized container, and added that round thing that you can see in the liquid. That’s the Kombucha mother mushroom. Well, it’s not really a mushroom. It’s a symbiotic blob of yeast and bacteria that eats the sugar, turning the tea into Kombucha which, when made properly, is “a bubbly apple cider-like drink.” Apparently non-alcoholic.

I bought the mushroom online. They told me it’s totally safe.

See those nasty looking blobs coming up to the surface for air? Those are the beginnings of the baby mushroom. A new baby forms at the surface every time you brew Kombucha. You can give the babies to your friends and they can brew their own Kombucha. Built-in viral marketing!

Anyway, this is the weirdest thing I’ve ever cooked. Well, it’s not really cooking.