Put a very clean on a scale and zero out your tare. Add blueberries, whey, the weigh, then add 2% salt. So 1000 grams of bloobers and whey would be 20 grams of salt. Next, wait. Thats it. We’ve been doing this a lot more lately…Maybe it’ll be our next cool thing that no one pays attention to. The subject of that passive aggressive power thrust is fermented salt syrups like this one here. Yes, you can make one and be cool too. I like them because for one they make Angel very nervous and two, they utilize waste. I’m always thinking of ways to use old lime and lemon juice and whatever else is lingering around. The kitchen produces a lot of whey and other stuff like cherry pits, etc. You can use all of this crap for cocktails. Yes you!

I first encountered kvass in Russia. It’s old school stale bread and whey fermentation. Yes, the OGs knew how to really utilize their waste products and how to preserve food in the days before refridgeration. You don’t always have to make meatballs and bread pudding with your leftover bread. You can make kvass. And sometimes you can make other kinds of kvass too. Good ol’ Sandor Katz talks it up in his book from 2003 Wild Fermentation.

Yes, a tale. It was the morning of New Year’s Day and I had a whopping hangover. Many vodka toasts…My lord…And I think I had eaten cotton candy the night before. Anyway, the tradition was you wake up and drink dark Czech beer and eat this cold soup called Okroshka which consisted of ham, hard boiled eggs, sour cream, radishes, cucumbers, and dill, all with a base of kvass. Pretty good. Hearty. Dill and sour cream are some of my favorite people and if you’re adding ham and hard boiled eggs then we have ourselves a little party.

On the side of the road in the city in Russia where I stayed there would be people (well, babushkas) selling all sorts of homemade stuff. My fave was a spicy red paste condiment called Adjika, originally from Georgia (the country not the state). I started putting it on everything until I was told my host had become a bit insulted that I was slathering this stuff on everything she cooked. Whoopsie.

Anyway, I noticed that large bottles of rye bread kvass were also being sold at these little markets. Something like this would be made differently than what I’ve been making at the restaurant. The concoction would be mostly water with the stale bread soaked into it, salt of course, and then a few tablespoons of whey to activate the fermentation process. Once you got it going, you would just take a portion of your old batch of kvass and add it to the new one much like a mother dough. It’s not only part of thoughtful usage or using waste, whatever you want to call it, but it’s also probiotic, meaning it’s good for your gut microbiome.

At the restaurant we have mucho whey kicking around at all times. If you want a cheat code for cocktails, make whey syrup. Why? Why do you think chefs put butter in everything? Why does your first recollection of a mudslide leave you salivating and teary eyed? Because dairy, booze, and sugar form like Voltron, that’s why. The big problem, of course, will always be the conflict between dairy items like milk when combined with citrus. In the most simple terms, citrus lowers the ph, the milk curdles. Gross. But wait, strain it and now you have whey which is creamy, tangy, and delicious and does not break, just like Tony Montana’s balls.