Anyone ever made kefir?

[amalnahurriyeh]

I'm a practiced yogurt-maker, since my son won't drink plain milk but will drink yogurt/OJ smoothies, and we're on WIC which means we get lots of free milk. (It helps that I have my mother-in-law's yogurt maker from the 1970s, which didn't get used until I cleaned out her house for her sell.) But today, he successfully drank purchased kefir, which opens up some new opportunities. Has anyone ever made kefir? According to my strategic Googling, you can't just use kefir as a starter, you actually need grains. But kefir appears to be less of a PITA to make (no need to scald the milk and so forth, made at room temp, could be pre-flavored to cut down on us needing to buy so much OJ, etc).

(Making yogurt is fun, though, if you can score a second-hand maker or if, say, your crock-pot goes that low. Especially because you can add a lot of cream to it and get particularly yummy yogurt as a result. I've been enjoying it, except the burned boiled-over milk on the stove.)

Comments

[amalnahurriyeh]

a large earthenware bowl in a low oven and I think I ended up with well... milk. Lukewarm milk.

Totally not an expert, but it sounds like your culture couldn't grow fast enough and it just stayed milk. If you check yogurt like only an hour or two into the process, it'll just be like warm milk--it takes five-six hours to get somewhere, minimum. So maybe yours stalled out somewhere. People say yogurt just happens; I call bullshit on that.

Oh, yogurt with cream in it. I started doing it because I've got some sort of weird dairy intolerance, where the lower-fat the dairy product is, the weirder it tastes/feels to me--so ice cream, triple-creme cheese, whipped cream, and butter are all fine, but skim milk and regular cheese are right out. (You know, I think I won that lottery.) So I ended up only being able to eat this yogurt, which is amaaaaaaaazing but a little pricey, so I could make my own, and it was awesome. I've just been making whole milk for the baby, but I may start adding cream to it, because he's having trouble maintaining his weight, and yogurt is the highest-fat thing he'll consume.

I have used packaged-starter yogurt as starter, and it's worked. Probably at some point you'll need to buy more, but you definitely don't have to buy new starter every time. What I did for a while was only put cups in 4 of the five cup-holes in my yogurt maker, and put a babyfood jar of leftover milk and starter in the last, and then save that for the next batch's starter. It worked pretty well. If I had one of those yogurt makers that just makes one big container, I'd pull some early to remember to use as starter, because it's sad to get to the bottom of the thing and say, dammit, I needed starter for the rest. (That's part of why I'm intrigued by kefir, since you pull the grains out and reuse them over, rather than having to save some of the actual beverage.)

[stripped]

Yeah, I think mine just stalled out. Next time I'll buy a culture -- I can't remember what I used for the starter, but it was what the recipe recommended.

Now you have me totally wanting to try making it again.

I have to admit, kefir kind of scares me. I tried a purchased one once, but the texture put me off (I can drink a smoothy, but I don't like gritty drinks). I had been drinking it because someone suggested it for some digestive issue I was having, but it just didn't work well for me.

Yogurt, on the other hand, I love love love eating. Mm. I am now thinking I need to work lunch around having some as part of it...