If you are the kind of person who ends with a jar of pickles and finds yourself sharing at the end of juice, Kanji is the drink that you don't expect. Offer throughout India, it's like a brine you can drink in the glass: the burning, sour, and the same deep purple that a beautiful dinosaur or the name of a nice stone.
Kanji, who shares a nickname rice dishesDates Back to the Indus Valley Civilization Between 3300 and 1300 BCE, is a seasonal drink in India, where it appears only for a few weeks to the Summer, when the sun is warm enough to coax a ferment but winter vegetables and beets from the markets. Made with carrots, beets, crushed mustard seeds, pink salt, and sometimes a whispering in Pungent Chaat Masala, Kanji can be your cooler. Electrolyte-rich and accompanying bacteria lovely to gut-friendly, it is a loud as it is a tart. Another way to think it is like homemade gatorade, if Gatorade has a soul.
When I grew up in India, Kanji was one of the drinks that didn't come without a ceremony but marked time. It means spring gives way to summer; The weather of ferments begins. A cousin will bring a bottle. An aunt will take a batch. In some neighborhoods, “Kanji aunties” sells their home versions used in used glass bottles and jars of all sizes.
I remember my first sip of Kanji clearly. I hate it. Mustard to hit like a slap. I paniced as my mouth became an alarming purple while my mother laughed, untrustworthy. Not the taste of childhood treats, non-mango or candy – it's a tasty taste, as unpredictable as raw garlic or blue cheese. Years ago, when I tried to explain my mother's companion, he shrugged. “Oh,” he said, “So it's tea with tea?”
But unlike Kombucha, who needed a scoby (symbolic culture of bacteria and yeast), thick and odd like a jellyfish pressed in glass, what's up with it. No starter, no cellulose mat, no mother. Just wait, salt, and time. In Kombucha, the scoby feeds on tea sugar, which is converted to acids, carbon dioxide, and an alcohol repair of a leaved and lactic acid bacteria. Kanji also made it, in the unreal manner: sugars from carrots and beets become food for wild microbes, and the crushed mustard seeds help shape.
In Delhi this March, I drank it by glass. The beets painted my lips a red gothic, mustard warmed the back in my throat, and the brightness of the drink hurt me for soda. After five days of day-to-day, Kanji lived, animated with the memory of heat. I wonder why I spent a lot of money in Kombucha for many years and never tried to make Kanji.
The process is simple. In India, the black carrots in the traditional, their color is deep, beaten purple, but I use a mix of purple beets and orange carrots since they can find. I peeled and cut it into the batons and dropped it into a sterilized, middle gallon glass glass. Next, I crushed two tablespoons of mustard seeds until they bloom under pests, and stimulated them with three teaspoons of pink salt and two teaspoons each of Chile in Masala and Red Chile Powder. I asked the jar with eight cups of water at room temperature, covered the lid, and left it on the windowsill to get the light in the spring. (If you are not sure the content of the glass you used is airtight, it is safe with a cheesecloth tied around the rim with a rubber band.)
At first, nothing happened. But then, over the days, the jar lived with bubbles floating in the lid. It's not like a controlled fermentation of a starter, but a feral is guided by the correct microbial condition and sunshine. In warmer months, the process can take less than two days; During the winter, it can take up to a week.
In the fifth day, I heard a pop from another room, the lid that flows from pressure. I cracked it open slowly, escape the gas with short bursts. The drink smelled sharp and earthy and tasted sour than salt, meant that ferment occurred.
Once the Kanji is fermented, you can leave the pickled vegetables in the jar, letting them tumble into each glass like a chaser, or strain them out, which is less traditional, but tidier. I rescued pickled beets and carrots for sandwiches, grain bowls, whatever applicable to a damn of light.
Served with ice-cold, Kanji is a revelation. I love to break the glass with thaat masala and salt (Tajín working in a pinch) and thaw drinks and lemon juice. Sometimes, I add a gin or vodka glug. Other times, I cool it to ice pops whose colors of tongues and napkins.
But even in its simple form, Kanji is enough. A wonderful day and time. You don't forget your first glass in Kanji – and your second, you're waiting to go around spring.