Kleinschmidt Wolfgang - Pop, bubble & fizz: recipes for homemade drinks & snacks

I like ice-cold drinks and Im particular when it comes to how cold they are. I stock up the freezer with ice and feel a bit down if I have to drink soda or lemonade without ice. Besides, if its a soda, you dont get that same tickling feeling from the carbonic acid if the drink is lukewarm. Because thats the sensation Im after that prickly cold mouthful that gets the flavours going and quenches the thirst.

After working as a chef and a food writer for many years I trained as sommelier to learn more about combining food and drink. I soon realised that its actually not only wine, decent beer and spirits that can match with the food, but also beverages flavoured with fruit, herbs and spices.

I m on a constant hunt for exciting liquid flavours and experiences: the acidity in a perfectly balanced lemonade, the fresh taste of a melon and lime soda or the bitterness in a grapefruit-fermented soda.

M y earliest memories of fizzy drinks go back to my childhood when I was allowed to go down into the larder in the basement and pick a bottle of pop from the red plastic crate. It stood on the shelf next to homemade cordial and marmalade.

I also remember the feeling of luxury when standing in the food store choosing which 24 fizzy pops we should fill the compartments with. My favourites were Swedish classics such as sugar soda, or raspberry or other fruit sodas.

M y taste for fizzy drinks has changed over the years. Today I get more excited by drinks that have a lovely dry character with a good balance between acidity and sweetness. Once youve tried homemade soda its difficult even to consider the sugar-infested fizzy pop you often get at the supermarket. The naturally fermented soda is a particular favourite. Through lacto-fermentation, the finished drink gets a deep flavour thats almost irresistible.

M y hunt for drinks has taken me all over the world. In Mexico I gulped down buckets of cooling agua de sanda while crunching on freshly fried tortilla chips with guacamole sitting by tables covered with salsa-sticky wax cloths. I munched the occasional coriander-stuffed taco with a glass of agua de flor de Jamaica on the beach and, after dinners of spicy enchiladas, I sipped on a sickly sweet but oh-so-cooling horchata, made from rice and with a taste of cinnamon and vanilla, almost like a milkshake.

I n the Amazon jungle I almost missed the flight back to Lima when I just had to try a glass of juice made from cashew apple that a local show owner had praised to high heaven. I still remember the taste, which was a bit nutty and creamy but still refreshing and cooling.

I n Peru I drank the countrys pride, Inca Kola, a poisonous-looking, bright yellow soda that tastes of bubblegum. It was frankly disgusting the first time I tried it, but after some time I couldnt be without it at the weekend. Once back home, the addiction slowly went away once the memories of the trip started to fade.

I n England Ive scoffed down piles of vinegar crisps while sipping iced tea and rose lemonade. And in Asia Ive had sickly sweet bubble tea, a drink that comes with lots of slimy bubbles made from tapioca at the bottom. It doesnt sound very nice but, just like a Mexican horchata, can be compared to a milkshake or an iced tea with a lot of milk.

N owadays I always have a batch of kombucha brewing in my kitchen after having tried it for the first time in the US I was hooked after the first mouthful of the acidic fresh fermented tea.

I ve drunk my way through a whole lot of what the world has to offer in refreshing alcohol-free beverages, but its been through my travels to the US that Ive realised that soda and fizzy drinks can be so much more than an artificially sweet, factory-produced drink: making them can be a real craft. In recent years Ive noticed a trend towards using natural ingredients as a base and adding your own carbonated water, and brewing your own soda using natural fermentation. We are turning further away from the bottles of soda made with chemically produced corn syrup that were designed to travel long distances and instead using filtered tap water and Demerara sugar or molasses as a base.

F rom visiting small soda producers and soda fountains Ive learned the basics of soda production using natural ingredients. And Ive gathered all my notes here together with recipes for cooled lemonades and fruit beverages, and some tasty snacks to go with them. After a period of testing you can start swapping berries, fruit and spices to make your own flavour combinations. The important thing is to stick to the same ratio of yeast and soda to liquid to avoid over-fermenting and failed fermentation. Apart from that youll just have to load up the freezer with ice and get started on the boiling, brewing, pressing and blending.

Good luck!
Tove

Its easy to make your own soda. You dont need any advanced equipment and in contrast to brewing beer, wine and cider its very quick to produce a tasty fizzy drink. If you just take it easy, follow the recipes and dont let yourself get upset if the first batch isnt completely successful, youll be able to drink plenty of glasses of ice-cold soda.

Ive created loads of recipes for different types of soda some of which are quick and can be served up after 10 minutes and others that are a little more advanced and will need to go through a fermentation process in order to become bubbly and carbonated.

One tip is to read through the information on the next few pages carefully before you get started, as it will make it a lot easier to follow the recipes and then after a little practice start to create your own.

T he important thing about soda is carbonic acid and there are several different ways to create these tasty bubbles. You can either mix together carbonated water with flavoured syrup, brew soda with yeast, or use natural fermentation.

T he simplest technique is to use a soda maker or a classic soda siphon that can be found in department stores. With one of these and some soda syrup, you can mix your own drink, as you would with a cordial, and decide for yourself how concentrated a flavour you want. This is the classic technique and is pretty much what happens when you get a drink from a soda dispenser a flavoured concentrate mixing with carbonated water. Thats why coke can taste different depending on where you are, as any residual flavours in the water will flavour the drink.

A nother technique is to brew the soda using yeast or through natural fermentation. When brewing with yeast I use liquid champagne or cider yeast. (The Edelmans and Wyeast brands give the least amount of residual flavour.) After many tests using normal bakers yeast and beer yeast, I decided that there isnt any alternative to the champagne yeast, since the soda simply didnt end up tasting nice.