Skip to main content

Kefir - a surprising taste....

My husband and I tried kefir at the cheese-making course we did a few weeks ago.  We were able to purchase a few grains to take home and start growing our own.  My husband took a few sips of the kefir at the course and gave the rest of his cup to me to finish (this was after a long day of eating sour fermented foods and he'd had enough).  It is a strange taste!  He wasn't too keen about buying some, as he didn't think we'd use it, but I bought some anyway (only $2 for a teaspoon-full) and I was very surprised when he decided to help me grow it after I'd lost a bit of interest.  He said that he was feeling good from all the fresh milk and wanted to try kefir to see if he had any further health benefits.  This is coming from a man who won't eat yoghurt!  So if you can get some grains and can get used to the taste, it may be worth it if you start enjoying better digestion.


If you haven't heard of kefir, it is a mixture of bacteria and yeasts that grow in milk (or sugar water, see below) and are beneficial to your digestion.  The microbes grow to form solid "grains" which can be harvested and used to inoculate fresh batches of milk, they are not really grains, just globs polysaccharides produced by the microbes. The "kefirred" milk is then drunk, either neat or in a smoothie.  The taste is like very strong blue cheese with a hint of fizzyness.  If you put it in a smoothie with banana you can't even taste it (just we haven't had cheap bananas here since a cyclone knocked out the north QLD banana plantations, hope they re-grow soon, $13/kg means we don't buy them often!).  There is a much more detailed explanation on Craving Fresh.  Basically, you leave the jar of milk and grains out on the bench for a few days until you start to see some action, then you strain out the grains and use the milk, starting a new batch with the grains and fresh milk.  If you have too much keffired milk or want to leave it for a while, you can put the mixture in the fridge, where it will grow more slowing, just needs a milk top-up occasionally.

You can use the milk to drink, or to start lactic fermentation of veges or milk/cream, or to pre-soak cereal grains.  Its pretty useful stuff.  If you don't like milk, you can also use kefir grains to ferment sugar and water mixtures, I haven't tried it yet, but there's some great recipes on Craving Fresh also.

The great thing about kefir is that it continues to grow, so when you have plenty you can start giving it away.  I currently sell mine for $5 for a tablespoon, including postage anywhere in Australia, email me if you're interested eight dot acres dot liz at gmail dot com.

Do you use kefir?  Have you tried it?  Do you want to?

Comments

  1. I've heard of kefir but had no idea what it was. Learn something new everyday!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi there, I am loving your blog, having just found it yesterday, but reading through lots of info...I have been experimenting heaps with water kefir, and also milk kefir, milk kefir makes the yummiest scones.....
    here is some of my water kefir experiments...
    http://justlikemynanmade.blogspot.com/2011/07/kefir-fizzy-for-weekend.html

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Thanks, I appreciate all your comments, suggestions and questions, but I don't always get time to reply right away. If you need me to reply personally to a question, please leave your email address in the comment or in your profile, or email me directly on eight.acres.liz at gmail.com

Popular posts from this blog

The new Eight Acres website is live!

Very soon this blogspot address will automatically redirect to the new Eight Acres site, but in the meantime, you can check it out here .  You will find all my soaps, ebooks and beeswax/honey products there, as well as the blog (needs a tidy up, but its all there!).  I will be gradually updating all my social media links and updating and sharing blog posts over the next few months.  I'm very excited to share this new website with you!

Chicken tractor guest post

Sign up for my weekly email updates here , you will find out more about chickens, soap and our farmlife, straight to your inbox, never miss a post!  New soap website and shop opening soon.... Tanya from Lovely Greens invited me to write a guest post on chicken tractors for her blog.  I can't believe how many page views I get for chicken tractors, they seem to be a real area of interest and I hope that the information on my blog has helped people.  I find that when I use something everyday, I forget the details that other people may not be aware of, so in this post for Tanya, I tried to just write everything I could think of that I haven't covered in previous posts.  I tried to explain everything we do and why, so that people in other locations and situations can figure out how best to use chicken tractors with their own chickens. The dogs like to hang out behind the chicken tractors and eat chicken poo.  Dogs are gross! If you want to read more about chicken tractor

How to make soap with beer (and tallow)

I may  have mentioned this before.... soap making is addictive!  Once you start, you just want to keep making more soap.  And not the same soap, you want to try all sorts of different soaps.  I made the mistake of joining a facebook group called Saponification Nation  and now my facebook newsfeed is full of glorious soaps, in all colours and shapes, which makes it even harder to resist the urge to experiment.  One soap that kept popping up a few weeks ago was soap made with beer. I generally prefer not to use ingredients just for the sake of it, I like to know that they are adding something to the properties of the finished soap.   As you know, I don't like to use artificial ingredients either (colours or fragrances).   When I read about beer in soap I found out that beer adds sugar to the mixture, which increases lather.  I use tallow in my soap, which has limited lather, so anything that adds lather could improve the soap.  It also contributes a tan or brown colour to