One of my ongoing food preparation hobbies for the past 14 years or so has been making wild fermented sodas. I love the variety of ingredients that can be used to make flavorful, refreshing, fizzy drinks full of beneficial microorganisms (bacteria and yeasts). I enjoy making sodas all year long, but there’s something about winter, and around the holidays in particular, that make them extra appealing. This appeal is likely due to the heavier foods people tend to consume at this time of the year, and the drier and colder air making us more dehydrated… a hydrating, fizzy digestive aid is the perfect remedy.
Luckily, several edible and medicinal wild plants are available at this time of the year that happen to make excellent soda ingredients. When I was processing a recent batch of wild persimmons, smashing the pulp through a colander, there was still a lot of fruit pulp attached to the leftover seeds. I ended up adding it all to a jar with water and shaking vigorously, then straining this “persimmon water” through a colander to remove the seeds. This was turned into a 2-gallon batch of persimmon ginger soda, which we just recently finished drinking.
Next on the menu are juniper berry and prickly pear sodas!
The juniper soda is based on a fermented juniper berry drink that originated in the Balkan countries, and its most popular name ‘smreka’ is Bosnian. Their native juniper berries from Juniperus communis are larger than our Eastern red cedar (Juniperus virginiana) berries, but both can be used in the same way.
Smreka making is still a common tradition in Bosnia, Armenia, Croatia, Serbia and other Balkan countries. Some families will ferment kilos of berries in large barrels, to have a consistent supply throughout the year. The only required ingredients are juniper berries and pure water, and that’s all I use, personally. It’s also common to add lemon juice, and less commonly other kinds of fruit, as well. The berries need to sit in the water until the flavor is slightly tart and effervescent, which may take 10 to 40 days, depending on several factors including the temperature of the room, light exposure, and the amount of drink being fermented. The berry-to-water ratio can vary as well, but shouldn’t matter much as long as there are enough berries to produce a flavorful finished product.
The formula I learned initially is easy to remember: 1 cup of berries, 1 gallon of water, and 1 month of fermentation time.
I add 1 cup of fresh juniper berries to a 1-gallon glass jar (or 1/2 cup berries to a half gallon jar), fill almost to the top with purified water, screw on the lid, and let it sit at room temperature (a warm room is best). I shake it occasionally (daily is great if you can remember, but not necessary), and periodically unscrew the lid to relieve any slight pressure buildup from the fermentation process. During this time, you may see berries sinking down from the top, and/or rising upward from the bottom… it looks really cool!
The berries contain a small amount of sugar, and the waxy outer coating of the berry contains some wild yeast. When added to water, the yeast starts to consume the sugar, producing lactic acid bacteria through a natural fermentation process. Since it’s wild yeast (which isn’t as strong as the pure yeast strains designed for wine and beer making) and there is only a small amount of sugar in the berries, the carbon dioxide (bubbles) produced is negligible, so the finished product will just have a slight effervescence.
When a batch is finished, strain out all the berries, so only liquid remains. This can be drunk straight, or with a little honey or lemon juice added. However, my favorite way is to make it into a soda! This means adding sugar, then keeping the smreka with added sugar in flip-top soda bottles for about a week. These bottles will hold in the carbonation so it can’t escape, and the stronger concentration of sugar will be consumed by the yeast at a much faster rate, producing a natural carbonation level that’s closer to a soda drink. Plus, I love how the additional sweetness complements the complex juniper flavors, which remind me of pine, rosemary and citrus all at once.
My recipe is one gallon of strained smreka liquid, heated to a mild lukewarm temperature (not hot, or the bacteria will die), then add 1.5 cups of organic sugar. Stir until dissolved, then add to bottles using a funnel.
Store at room temperature, and check the sodas every so often. There should be some fizz after about a week. Once they have achieved your desired fizz level, keep them in the refrigerator and drink at your leisure.
Be sure not to leave the sodas at room temperature (outside the fridge) for too long, as it’s theoretically possible for them to build up too much carbonation after a long period of time, which will cause the drink to fizz over profusely when opened, or even explode. I have found this to be more likely to happen when using pure yeast strains meant for beer/wine/champagne making, which have much stronger bubbling effects. Wild fermentation happens more slowly and naturally, although the batches I make in the hot summer months ferment more quickly, so I’ve dealt with more “profuse fizzers” during that time.
Now onto the prickly pear sodas. It’s quite strange to think about a cactus fruit ripening in the winter, since in most places the fruit ripens in late summer or early autumn. However, for some reason in North Texas I find that I have to wait until early winter for the fruits to be appropriately ripe for harvesting.
This fruit generally feels more suited for the warmer seasons, as it seems to have considerable cooling properties, which makes sense if you’re wandering a desert environment during the hottest part of the summer, seeking nourishment and hydration. I have found that cooking (heating to a simmer) the prickly pear fruit juice reduces this property and makes it more appropriate for colder weather… more on this later!
Prickly pears are of the genus Opuntia, and this genus includes many species that grow throughout North America, but are most common in the desert southwest. The ripe, pinkish purple fruits (or “tunas”, as they are often called) from all Opuntia species are edible. It’s best to wait until the fruit is slightly soft and comes off the cactus easily before harvesting, making them more likely to taste mildly sweet and tart, instead of the commonly bitter flavor of the unripe fruits. However, they also need to be harvested before a hard frost, as freezing weather will ruin them.
Actually harvesting and processing them is a little tricky. The fruits are covered in two types of spines – the larger spines are obvious, sparse, and fairly easy to avoid, but the tiny orange glochids are sneaky and mean. They grow in bunches, and if they touch your skin at all, they will hook into you, and you will need to pull them out (tweezers work best). It’s not a pleasant experience. You can avoid this by grabbing them with tongs, or wearing thick rubber gloves while harvesting. There are various ways to get the glochids off, including rubbing them against the ground or on rocks, washing in water, burning them off, and other methods.
What I usually do is harvest the fruits with tongs, dropping them into a paper or plastic bag, then when I get home I wash them under running water. This usually removes some of the glochids, but not all. I don’t worry about the rest of them, because I have another way of removing them from the prickly pear juice finished product. I add several washed fruits into a blender container, then some water up to the same level as the fruits, and blend well. Pour the pulpy, seedy, bright pink liquid through a fine mesh strainer (I use a nut milk bag), massaging the bag until all the liquid has come through into a clean container. It’s very thick, so may take some time. Even though the fully blended liquid contains glochid residue, the strainer removes it so it won’t pass into the juice, and I’ve found that touching the pulp doesn’t affect my hands in the way that whole glochids do.
When you have strained the juice, it will be thick and bright pink. You can store it this way in the fridge, or the freezer if you want to save it for later (you can also freeze the whole, unprocessed fruits). It’s best to use it diluted, like adding a splash into some lemonade or another fruity drink. Even a small amount will turn any drink bright pink, which is so much fun!
Now for the strange part, which took me a long time to figure out… I started noticing many years ago that if I consume a fair amount of undiluted, raw prickly pear juice, I would experience body aches, chills and fever a few hours later. It is kind of like a brief flu, without any other symptoms. I had never heard of this happening before it happened to me. Since then, I’ve found brief mentions from random sources that this may happen to some people if they consume too much of the raw juice. Desert Harvesters, non-profit organization that provides education about food that grows in the desert, mentions this phenomenon on their website, along with an explanation:
“Prickly pear juice is very cooling. Do not consume high quantities of non-diluted raw juice as it is occasionally known to cause chills and body aches. Drinking a few glasses of lemonade is absolutely fine and will give you the cooling effect you’re seeking in the dog days of August and the ever-lingering September summer.”
I’ve had this experience a few times, so now I make sure that I dilute the juice well with other liquids, and/or heat the juice before drinking it. This way of consuming it hasn’t caused any issues for me.
To make prickly pear soda, I use 1 pint of prickly pear juice, 1/4 cup lemon juice, 3 quarts of purified water, and a pint of strained ginger culture (or “ginger bug”). I describe how to make the ginger culture in another blog post, Foraging smooth sumac, and a sumac soda recipe. After heating the prickly pear juice to a simmer for a few minutes (to reduce the cooling effects), I add one of the quarts of water, then stir in 1.5 cups of organic sugar until dissolved. Then I add the rest of the water, the lemon juice, and then the ginger culture, making sure that the batch of liquid is only lukewarm (not too hot) before adding the ginger culture.
Then pour the soda liquid into flip top bottles through a funnel, and keep them at room temperature for several days, checking the sodas after 3-4 days for carbonation. If you open the bottles and hear nothing, they need to go a few more days. If you hear a tiny “psss”, they are starting to carbonate, and will likely be perfect in another day or two. If you see visible foaming (about a quarter of an inch or less before it dissipates) , I’d say this is the ideal carbonation stage! At this point, refrigerate the bottles and drink at your leisure.
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