Boza

 

Boza is a thousands of years old, non-alcoholic, fermented drink made from the millet flour, originating from Central Asia. It is gluten free, dairy free, vegan, and probiotic. It has a unique taste which is not available in any other drink.

I used to drink it at Vefa Bozacısı, a three hundred years old Boza house in Istanbul, when I was a young child. They had a family feud around early 2000s and they never recovered their taste and the quality after that event.

What makes Boza particularly difficult to commercialize is that the fermentation continues even under refrigeration, and after about a week, it becomes undrinkable. Traditionally they weren't even making it during the summer for this reason. You can also find it in the grocery stores in Turkey, but the product is pasteurized to keep it consumable for days and weeks, and therefore loses all the probiotic health benefits and also some of its taste in the process.

This is why I have done some research and experimentation to figure out how to make it at home. Big advantage of making it yourself is that you can fine tune the taste to your liking, and drink high quality Boza with all the health benefits intact.

You can find many different recipes online. Each of those have issues and missing details. Although it doesn't include anything specifically about Boza, the The Art of Fermentation book by Sandor Katz taught me enough about the fermentation process, and I was able to comb through the online information and recreate the taste I still remember from my childhood.

Make it, share it, and enjoy it!

Ingredients

1. Millet flour. You can also use regular millet, but boiling takes more time, and you end up with a bit of annoying millet taste in the final drink, so just use the flour. Use of other grains is also possible, and might be good to experiment with, but the real Boza is made from millet flour. I'm using Bob's Red Mill brand.
2. Cane sugar.
3. Water. Too soft, such as distilled, or hard water might affect fermentation negatively. You might want to use a filter if your tap water is too hard.
4. Starter culture. Basically a cup from the previous batch. I used active dry yeast for the first time, and it worked well. If you start with yeast, you will need to make a couple batches of Boza, each started with prior generation, until the taste improves and the slight bitterness is gone.

Measurements

Scale	Boza Yield	1st Water	Millet flour	2nd Water	Sugar
1x	1 L	750 mL	125 gr	600 mL	225 gr
2x	2 L	1500 mL	250 gr	1200 mL	450 gr
3x	3 L	2250 mL	375 gr	1800 mL	675 gr
4x	4 L	3000 mL	500 gr	2400 mL	900 gr

The 1x scale is mainly for the yeast start so that you avoid using too much materials for the inferior tasting batches. I usually use the 3x scale which fits nicely into my 6 liters cooking pot and yields a decent amount of Boza for a week. Numbers below are given for that scale, but you can just replace them with any other scale from the table.

You can also scale them up and down even more, pretty much linearly, but you might run into issues with home kitchen sized cooking equipment :)

Day 1

• Fill the pot with 2250 milliliters of water and boil it.
• Slowly pour 375 gram of millet flour while whisking it to prevent clumps.
• Keep stirring with a wooden spatula until the batter is stretching and splitting while dripping from the spatula (see the video).

• Pour the batter into a flat borosilicate glass roaster and let it cool by itself. I usually cover it with a tray.
• You don't really need to wait a full day at this point. As long as the texture is similar to the video below, and it cooled down to the room temperature, you can proceed to the next step.

Day 2

• Boil 1800 milliliters of water.
• Put the cooled down dough, piece by piece, into boiling water while using an immersion blender to mix it.
• Keep stirring with the wooden spatula until the texture is smooth.

• Pour 675 gram of sugar while mixing with blender as before.
• Turn off the heat, continue stirring as it cools down until the temperature is 50 ºC.
• If you are using starter, pour about a cup of Boza from previous generation and mix around with the spatula. If this is the first time, put just a tiny amount of active dry yeast. Something like a quarter of a peanut. Starter is not sensitive to the exact amount and you have a lot of leeway, but even a little bit too much yeast can ruin the taste quickly by producing a lot of alcohol in this sugar rich environment and taking over any other bacteria from millet.
• Pour into one or two, deep and not too narrow glass containers.
• At this stage, the mix should cool down slowly and have access to oxygen. Easiest method for that is covering the container with a towel and keeping them in the cold oven.
• Since we want bacteria to grow, stirring it once or twice to mix more oxygen in would be helpful. I generally do it after six hours to give a boost.

Day 3

• You should see some gas bubbles in the mix now, and even a little bit of smell.

• Now cover the glass containers with plastic wrap and store in room temperature for another day.
• We want fermentation to go slow, so make sure the containers don't get too warm from sunlight or another heat source.

Day 4

• Boza should be somewhat bubbly at this point from the gasses of fermentation.

• Filter it through a sieve.
• Save about a cup of it into a small glass jar as a starter for the next generation.
• If the texture turned out to be too thick, you may thin it with a little warm (~30 ºC) water.
• Pour it into a glass carafe and store it in the refrigerator for at least a day.

• As you wait, the drink progresses from sweet to sour, so you can adjust to your liking. It should be better consumed within ten days unless you prefer an alcoholic drink :)
• Spreading a bit of cinnamon over Boza is traditional, and you wouldn't be judged for using a spoon to scrape the bottom of the cup.
• I have only waited a week at most between each batch so far, but the long term storage of the starter should be similar to other fermented starters.
• Bon apetit!