Milk Kefir

I bought some milk kefir grains from Cultures for Health earlier this year. It's been a fun and rewarding learning experience. It's like having a pet that you have to feed and take care of, but in return you get delicious homemade milk kefir.

The common store brand of milk kefir, around here, is LifeWay. They deliver an ultra filtered, perfect creamy blend for a large market. It's actually quite good with a sour punch to the mouth. So good that I wanted to save myself the money and make it at home. That's how I got started.

Comparison

Homemade kefir is quite different from the store bought variety. Running it through a stainless steel filter, once, produces a slushy texture. It is not as sour, though I wish it were, and it may have a slightly yeasty smell and taste.

Aside from these differences, the homemade is said to have more cultures. For example, the Lifeway brand says on the bottle that it has 12 probiotic cultures. Homemade is said to have more than 60.

Why Kefir

There's a growing interset in gut health. Fermented foods, kefir included, is said to be one of the best remedies for gut problems. Once my taste buds, and gut, adapted to this stuff, it becomes something that my body craved more. Having a tall glass of kefir for breakfast keeps my hunger and blood sugar at ease for hours.

The Grains

While these are called grains, they have absolutley nothing to do with wheat or any kind of cereal. They are called grains because each 'grain' is a super colony of symbiotic bacteria. They are very hungry. I read somewhere that in the fermentation world, they are the quickest at what they do.

Cultures for Health

I ordered the live cultures from this online store. They shipped for about a week. I received them in a small plastic jar. What a I saw in the jar concerned me. It looked practically empty with a small amount of milk. Little enough to not even circle the bottom ring of the jar. As for the kefir, it looked like there were a few grains. It was hard to tell.

Learning

Nevertheless, I started the journey of learning something new. I started in the winter, which effects the speed of cultures. This made everything take longer. I was in periods of doubt and confusion as what to do. But I heald to the task. I first weighed only a few kilograms of grains.

I have only ever used whole milk from the local grocer. The first few batches tasted like alchoholic milk. They weren't good enough to drink. Then there were the yeasty batches. I was getting worried around this stage. My mistake was giving the cultures too much milk from the start. So I reduced down to a cup and increased them from there.

Now they're weighing around 20 kilograms. They ferment a litre of milk in about a day. Each batch seems to taste better than the last. More creamy and more sour.

Here's a picture of my grains in the early stages. They look like cottage cheese.

Community

If you are just getting started with milk kefir grains and want to share your experience or need some advice, feel free to contact me.