Care and Feeding of Your Kefir Grains

This is a letter I wrote to a friend when I gave her kefir grains last week. I hope it is useful to you, as well!

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Congratulations! You are now the steward of an amazing life form, kefir, that will provide you with cultured milk very little work on your part. You are the next a long and unbroken line of stewards that stretches back into the mists of time. Interestingly, no one really knows where kefir comes from or how it first came about. It is believed that the first kefir drinkers came from the mountains of the Caucasus where it is considered a gift from the gods. They may be right because no one has been able to grow kefir in a lab without a starter. Every kefir grain in the world is descended from those original grains.

Kefir grains, as they are called, are not really grains or seeds at all. The spongy “grains” are a colony of yeast and bacteria that convert the sugar in dairy milk into their own spongy outer covering, energy to live and reproduce and a whole host of acids, vitamins and alcoholic byproducts of their metabolism. The grains will grow and reproduce in any dairy milk and like to stay at room temperature so no heating is required. You can also use the grains to ferment other sweet liquids but the grains won’t reproduce. For more information on the microbiological make up of kefir grains, or for any other kind of information you could want about kefir, be sure to check out Dom’s Kefir In-Site.



Care and Feeding of Your Kefir Grains

The Very Basics

2 tbs of kefir grains
2 cups of milk

Place the kefir grains and milk in a glass jar with a lid and leave at room temperature until the milk thickens and sours. Strain the kefir, reserving the grains. Add the grains to fresh milk and store the finished kefir in the fridge until you use it.

See, wasn’t that easy?

Beyond the Basics

They also like to stay at a comfortable room temperature, somewhere between 50 and 70 degrees Fahrenheit. That being said, they are resilient buggers and can bounce back from a lot of abuse.

The Milk

Kefir grains are at their happiest in dairy milk that is as close to the way it came out of the animal as possible. They love raw milk but do just fine in pasteurized milk. They do fine in cow or goat milk (or any other type of dairy milk you happen to have) and prefer whole, full fat milk. Low fat milk would be fine, but do not keep them in ultra pasteurized milk (which is actually shelf stable, they just sell it refrigerated because Americans won’t buy shelf stable milk), or non-fat milk for extended periods. If you must buy these types of milk treat them as non-dairy milks, discussed below.

Oh – someday you should try popping your kefir grains into whipping cream. You will never look at sour cream the same way again. Yum!

The Grains and Separating Them

It is suggested to use 1-2 tablespoons of kefir grains to 2 cups of milk and let it ferment at room temperature for 24 hours. You will learn to adjust the amount of milk based on how your kefir grains are doing at culturing milk, the ambient temperature and how many grains you have available. Remember, these guys are hardy and will culture your milk as best they can in a wide variety of circumstances.

You don’t need to rinse your kefir grains (except in special cases as talked about below), just transfer them. They should be clearish white, quite puffy and complex and soft to the touch with a slimy coating. If they are hard, or yellow or smooth they are unhappy and you should check with Dom’s Kefir In-Site to see how to help them, or if they are beyond help.

To separate the grains from the finished kefir you can either strain the kefir through a wire mesh (or plastic, or bamboo) strainer, or fish them out with a spoon or fork. For a long time I fished mine out with a small wooden fork and liked the ease of this method. Any grains I didn’t ‘catch’ just stayed in the kefir and got blended when I made smoothies. I now tend to strain and like that method for two reasons. One, it catches all the tiny baby kefir grains that start to grow in the kefir and two, it helps break up and smooth out the curd of the finished kefir.

Utensils and Jars

I culture my kefir in glass jars with a screw top lid. I tend to ferment mine with the lid on tight because I am afraid of knocking it over and spilling it, but many people suggest leaving the lid slightly ajar, or using a towel or coffee filter over the top of the jar instead of a solid lid. A tight lid allows the kefir to get more fizzy and may alter the amount of alcohol in the finished kefir. Check Dom’s Kefir In-Site for more information about various ways to effect the final fermentation.

It is fine to use stainless steel strainers or utensils to handle kefir, but please make sure they are clean and not left in the kefir for an extended amount of time. Do not use any reactive metals like brass, aluminum, cast iron, or copper. Kefir is acidic and these metals are bad news with acidic food. Plastic or bamboo are other fine choices for handling kefir.

How do I know it’s Ready?

You will know the kefir is ready to strain because the milk will have thickened and smell sour rather than sweet. At first it will be like the consistency of buttermilk, store bought kefir or drinkable yogurt but eventually the kefir will curdle and separate. When this happens you will see a thick layer of white curds floating on top and a thin yellowish liquid below. Taste your kefir at various stages to see which you like to drink – most people prefer it when it has just thickened but I don’t mind curdled kefir, myself.

If the kefir has curdled I make sure the lid is on tight and shake the jar to break up the curds. Then I separate the grains through a strainer and the finished kefir is perfectly good for baking or sweetened smoothies. Remember, kefir is a mix of bacteria and yeast so it will always have a bit more of a yeasty flavor than yogurt or even store bought kefir (which by law is not allowed to have yeast in it). Experiment with more milk or less time if your kefir is too “ripe” or sour for your tastes.

Photo by David Niergarth.

Resting Your Kefir Grains

Your kefir grains will keep fermenting milk into kefir indefinitely as long as they have good milk and proper temperatures. But sometimes you need a break either because you have too much kefir or you won’t be able to strain the grains every day. Luckily, you can refrigerate the kefir grains for up to a couple months with no detriment to the grains.

When you are ready to give your grains a break put them in a clean jar with the same amount of fresh milk that they have been fermenting in a 24 hour period. Dom recommends this amount of milk for resting your grains for up to a week. He suggests increasing the milk by about 30% for each additional week of storage, or you can simply strain the kefir out each week. I have kept 3 tbs of kefir grains in a cup of milk for a couple months at a time and the grains have bounced back just fine. The kefir you strain off the grains after their rest in the fridge is perfectly safe to drink, though it may be thinner or more sour than usual.

Do note that different strains of bacteria and yeast respond to cold storage differently so kefir grains usually require a little care when coming back to full fermenting strength. They should also get to come out of the fridge and ferment at room temperature for a week or so every couple weeks or months so they don’t get too out of balance.

When bringing kefir grains out of the fridge strain them off the old kefir and put fresh milk over them like normal. I usually use a smaller proportion of milk than usual, and change the milk as soon as it seems sour, even if it is a slightly different consistency than usual. The kefir should come back to what you expect it to be within one or two cycles with fresh milk.

Culturing Non-Dairy Beverages

Kefir grains need dairy milk to grow and reproduce but they will culture any liquid into a probiotic beverage. There are two ways to culture non-dairy beverages – switching the grains back and forth, or sacrificing some of the grains to the non dairy beverage.

If you are going to make non dairy kefir only occasionally it is best to switch the grains back and forth. I occasionally make coconut milk kefir by plunking the strained grains into canned coconut milk and let that ferment for 12 or 24 hours. When the coconut kefir is ready strain out the grains and put them back in dairy milk. I often rinse my grains before putting them back in the dairy milk thinking that the surface of the grains needs to be in good contact with the dairy milk. Dom cautions against rinsing in most situations, and I am careful when rinsing to not contaminate the grains.

If you want to continuously ferment non-dairy kefir you should hold back a portion of the grains in dairy milk and use another portion for the non-dairy milk. Use the grains in soy, almond or coconut milk the way you would in dairy milk just being sure to note when they are no longer healthy looking or fermenting properly. Keep another portion in dairy milk so that it keeps growing and you have some to replenish your non-dairy grains when they no longer ferment properly. I’ve never done this method myself, but have heard of others doing it with great success.

You can also play around with fermenting juice or sugar water as well. It often goes alcoholic, but sometimes turns out very tasty.

What To Do With All Your Kefir

Kefir is great in smoothies and baked goods and in a million other dishes. It can basically be used anywhere you would use buttermilk, but it does have a bit of a yeasty flavor that can be unwelcome in some dishes. In other dishes you’d never know the milk was cultured. Here are my favorite ways to use kefir.

*Smoothies. Combine the kefir with frozen or fresh fruit, juice, ice, and sweetner of your choice in a blender to make a delicious smoothie. Add coconut oil, nut butter or good quality egg yolks to boost the protein and fat content, or use more juice to make it lighter. You can blend the kefir with a little fruit syrup or pulp to make it more like the flavored kefir at the store. Experiment with green smoothies!

*Blender Batter Pancakes. This is a method for making pancake or waffle batter by soaking whole grains in kefir overnight and then grinding in your blender. Here is Sue Gregg's original recipe, and here is my blog post on the recipe.

*Kefir naan or flatbread. This is a neat recipe where you combine kefir and wheat flour, knead it like regular bread dough, then let it raise overnight. The natural yeast in the kefir is all the leavening you need. It is a very sour dough but tender and delicious. Cook like naan or pita on a griddle, use as a pizza crust or bake as rolls. Here's the link to the website, and here's a photo and write up of the time I did it.

*Macaroni and cheese. Just use kefir instead of milk for boxed or real cheese sauce.

*Clafouti. This is a delicious, rustic French dessert (or decadent breakfast) that is essentially an eggy pudding studded with fruit. Here's the recipe I use. I just substitute kefir for the milk and use whatever fresh or frozen fruit you have.

This post is a part of Real Food Wednesdays. Check out more real food blogs at the carnival!

Pokrov Farm Tour

If you haven't gotten out to tour a farm yet this spring then get yourself in gear! Spring on a farm is a fantastic time. The weather is nice (but not too hot, so the animal smells aren't overwhelming), the vegetables are pretty (but not overgrown) and best of all... there are baby animals everywhere!!

A couple of weeks ago I was lucky enough to visit Kookoolan Farms in Yamhill, OR and this week I got to visit Pokrov Farm outside of Sandy, OR. I met Genevieve, one of the farmers, through my local Weston A Price Foundation email list when she advertised that her farm had CSA shares available for the summer. I jumped on board and am eagerly awaiting my first CSA basket - it comes next week! I happened to be driving by her place last weekend and stopped in to meet her family and tour the farm.

Their farm is set on a hill outside of Sandy, OR on the flanks of Mt. Hood. They are leasing 35 acres of some of the most beautiful farm land in western Oregon. They have green meadows, big trees, a creek and a pond, a couple barns and a lovely farm house. I pretty much want to move in with them. Genevieve is deeply inspired by Joel Salatin and his farming methods and attended a workshop in Southern Oregon last fall that led her to find this farm for her family. She is now homeschooling her children as well as running the farm along with her husband and two housemates. They've only been on the land since November but already have a lovely vegetable garden, about a million chickens, a milk cow and a couple happy pig and goat families.

One of the housemates (forgive me, I've forgotten his name - though I'll probably learn it next week at the CSA pick up) is a certified Master Gardener and in charge of the vegetable patch. It looks like it's growing great with a wide variety of veggies, herbs and even some flowers growing. Have I mentioned that I can't wait for my first basket?

They are using some old fashioned labor to till and fertilize a new extension to the garden - pigs! They've got a pair of pigs and this year's piglets fenced into an area that was weedy and dry just a couple weeks ago. As you can see the piggies are enjoying their mud baths as they dig for roots and insects and enjoy fresh air and sunlight. That is going to be some vitamin D rich lard! I found it really interesting when Genevieve mentioned that another farmer asked about renting her boar to breed with their sow. Apparently it is virtually impossible to find old fashioned pigs to make baby old fashioned pigs because most pig farmers use artificial insemination to breed in "new and improved" characteristics into their herd. Genevieve, with her everpresent optimism and openness said, "Sure! Let me research how to do that!".

Pokrov Farm seems to be crawling with chickens. Happy, outdoor, bug eating chickens! They have two big barns that both have adult chickens in them as well as a big room full of baby chickens! When we were visiting the two housemates were working on a Joel Salatin style chicken tractor so that the babies can move out into the field as soon as they get their feathers. Genevieve was saying that they got hooked in with a Southeast Asian community that wants a couple hundred live birds a month so that they can butcher them themselves. What a great things for a small farm to have such a standing order.

In one of the chicken houses they have a Joel Salatin style rabbit set up with the wire bottom cages over where the chickens are. The chickens scratch the rabbit droppings and keep the area clear of insects that might bother the rabbits. One of my favorite parts of the tour was getting to see the brand new baby rabbits. One mama rabbit had kindled her kits a couple days earlier and the other had kindled the night before I was there. The babies were like little pink blobs with bunny ears.

The other babies I got to see at the farm were baby goats, baby geese and baby turkeys. Genevieve ordered a mixed pack of turkey hatchlings so she doesn't even know what breeds they are. I ordered one for my thanksgiving dinner.... I'm not sure how I would feel about raising them from these tiny fluffy babies into dinner, but I'll be happy to eat them when they come my way! The geese were possibly the cutest things ever, but I didn't get a good picture. They were fuzzy and yellow, like cartoon ducklings. Genevieve is keeping a couple pygmy goats for milk and they had just kidded that week. I picked up one of the kids and it was tiny, like a puppy!

Genevieve's pride of the farm is her Jersey cow, Ella. Ella is producing milk that Genevieve is drinking and selling raw, as well as making cheese. She is planning on holding cheesemaking classes through the summer as well as other workshops. Genevieve was commenting on how they have been having a fly problem with Ella and are having a very hard time finding advice on how to treat external parasites without chemicals. She doesn't want to put poison on the animal that provides milk for her children. She did eventually find a method using pine tar and has the supplies on order.

Genevieve and her family are an inspiration to those of us with homesteading ambitions. She says she had been an urban homesteader in Portland, keeping chickens and digging up her lawn to plant vegetables. She and her husband saw an opportunity to move up a notch and have a real farm and have taken it. They are working hard and have lots more to go before they are assured a financially profitable farm, but they are supplying themselves with most of their own food. I am very proud to be able to support them this summer and have them support me! I can't wait to go out for a cheesemaking class or to harvest apples or fish trout in their pond. On top of it all, Genevieve is one of the most welcoming, optimistic and just plain sweet people I've met in a long time.

Now it's time for you to find a farm to go visit! Buy a CSA share, find someone producing raw milk or free range chickens! Go out there and meet your meat and veg with your veggies!

For more posts about REAL FOOD like the kind you get at small family farms check out the Real Food Wednesdays and Food Roots blog carnivals!

Kookoolan Farm Tour

I think every kid should get to visit a farm at least once in their life, don't you think? I've been teaching a veterinary science class to homeschooled kids these last six months and recently made sure that these kids had visited a farm. It wasn't just any farm, it was a Kookoolan Farm.

Kookoolan Farm is a small, pastured based farm in Yamhill, OR about an hour outside of Portland. Chrissie and Koorosh, the farmers, keep three Jersey cows for raw dairy, chickens for eggs and meat and have a licensed poultry processing facility there. They also partner with what is becoming a co-op of farmers to get humanely raised, grass fed meat to paying customers in the Portland area. They are a really amazing, real food farm.

The first thing my students noticed was the 3 week old calf tethered in the front yard. He was born on the farm and was tethered out so visitors could pet him to gentle him. One thing I found really interesting was Chrissie's comments on her Jerseys being, em, insistent mothers. As a dog person this makes perfect sense. When we breed a strain of animals to do one thing we get a fair amount of "logical conclusion" behavior. For example, Labradors have been bred to retrieve and many labs have weird mouthy/eating/carrying things around behavior. Jack Russell terriers were bred to chase rats so we see obsessive chasing and visual stimulation behaviors. Well, apparently when we breed cows to do nothing but be pregnant or nursing we get some "logical conclusions" behaviors around mothering. Chrissie says one of her cows gave birth and the other two were mothering the one calf so aggressively that she had to buy two more calves from other local farmers. This is one of her teddy bear calves. He is 5 days old and he sucked on my thumb. Soooo cute!! Baby cows are pretty much adorable.

Next we got to tour the chicken houses. Kookoolan has had up to 500 chickens at a time, though this year they are running a slightly smaller operation. The hens are free range and roost and next in one of two large sheds with some feed along with the next boxes. She noted the symbiotic relationship between the chickens and the cows. They feed a little bit of whole wheat to the cows that they don't digest, but entices the chickens to scratch through the manure. For as many animals as there were in her small yard, there really was very little animal smell.

It was fun to see the different personalities of the different chickens. Some came right up to use to see if we had anything for us while others scattered as we came near. Chrissie is raising another 100 chicks in a brooder with the hopes of having them come into egg laying around Christmas, when her current layers will be on their winter break. This will provide her with a steady supply of eggs through the holiday season, when we humans like to eat eggs in things like pumpkin pie.

We also got to see the milking house and talk a little bit about raw milk production. In Oregon it is legal to sell raw milk on the farm if you keep only a small number of animals and don't advertise. The kids noted some chickens drinking some milk out of a pan on the ground and this led Chrissie to tell us about their testing procedures for the milk. They use the standard milk test of a somatic cell count to determine cleanliness of the milk. This count detects white blood cells in the milk which indicate an immune response in the animal. In Washington and California, where raw milk is legal and licensed by the state, somatic cell counts must be below 10,000 cells per mL, and commercial dairies that pasteurize their milk have an average somatic cell count of around 300,000 cells per mL! At Kookoolan farm if somatic cell counts are any more than a few hundred cells per mL the milk goes to the chickens. That morning Glitter, one of their milk cows was dealing with a cut on her leg which caused her cell count to be higher. The milk was probably perfectly safe for human consumption but like most small farmers Chrissie's product is either perfect, or not good enough.

Another thing that so impressed me about Chrissie and Koorosh is the partnerships they've been able to form with other farmers in their area. They are raising beef with their immediate neighbor who is now 70 years old and doesn't want to work as hard as he used to. He raises the calves on his land and Chrissie and Koorosh market the meat to real-food aficionados in Portland who will pay top dollar. They've formed a similar partnership with a neighbor across the highway who raises lamb. For years he was driving to Woodburn to sell his grassfed lamb for 85 cents per pound on the hoof. By partnering with Kookoolan Farm and tapping into the premium meat demand they are now commanding a considerably higher price, and actually making money on their lambs. Yet another farmer raises pheasants and turkey, and others allows Chrissie's meat chickens to be raised in their orchards and vineyards.

The most amazing part of all of this is that Chrissie and Koorosh have only been doing this since the fall of 2005!! Chrissie says she never even had a pet before they bought their first batch of day old chicks. They had never milked cows or butchered chickens. They were managers at Intel and are simply willing to take the risks required to start a farm. Chrissie says she works harder now than she did at Intel, but is happier and healthier by a country mile.

Every kid should get to visit a farm, and every person should get to eat food produced with as much attention and care as the food produced at Kookoolan Farms. You can see more of my photos from the farm visit on my Flickr page. Also, please check out their website for more information on their practices, their cheesemaking classes and their offerings. And then find a farm like them near you to get your own real food.