Kefir -- Our New Healthy Digestion Aid

Are you getting your probiotic in pill form?

Recent studies say, no you are not!   What we know is that effective probiotics are live and can't be put in pill form.  They are cultures that die when exposed to heat (pasteurization) or cold, (transportation) or starved (six days from the manufacturing plant.)    If you want active culture probiotics, you gotta grow your own.  Homemade yogurt is a great source, and fermenting foods are too, but kefir is the new food fad and a fun and good way to grow probiotics.

We've been brewing water kefir for about two years thanks to my daughter-in-law who introduced us to the idea.  It has surpassed our other types of probiotic sources and we are feeling gut healthier.




What I've learned?

• Kefir has its ancient origins in the Middle East and is pronounced  KA FEAR.
• Kefir is delicious.
• Kefir is healthy.
• Kefir grains love 77 degrees and they grow well atop the water heater or sitting on the heated floor next to the furnace.
• Kefir grains feast on the sugar water and become a great paleo protein source.
• Kefir has helped my neighbor regulate her autoimmune condition and she is in disease remission. 
• I don't have the fancy fermenting air releasing bottles, and it still works great. 
• NO citrus juice can be used to ripen kefir.  Bad Plan!  It makes slime.    
• APPLE Juice is a terrific juice to add to ripening process.  Chemical structure of apple juice does marvelous things to kefir.  Which must be why they make a lot of apple beer.  DO NOT use the good stuff.  Apple Cider cold pressed will not feed cultures--I think it's the preserving process.  The 100% juice stuff  like that by Ocean Spray works great.  

I've tried dry and powdered starter and trust me, get some live from a friend or buy the live cultures - my source is Florida Kefir.  No, they don't pay me to say so.

And it's almost as exciting as growing Sea Monkeys from your youth! 


Now our problem is what to do when kefir grains multiply all over the place?

Pass it around and make everyone else's gut happy!

BEWARE

It seemed like a good plan to invite friends over for a kefir party and invite novices to drink too much of it all at once and then when they go home, they feel it later.

Kefir's claim to fame is that it kills the bad bacteria and repopulates the gut with good bacteria.  So if you have bad gut bacteria...

Google water kefir to get all the inside information. 
  Cultures for Health 

is my favorite site, but this video of a guy brewing kefir is one of my funniest finds.  If we are looking for more bacteria in our diet, a leather bracelet dunked repeatedly in the vat is a great fomenting tool.  Yum.  



Kefir has Three basic stages:

Brewing:  A quart of sugar water made with a quarter cup of sugar and filtered water is a great base.  Add the grains, cover loosely (so it gets adequate oxygen) leave in a warm area for 24 - 48 hours.  The longer you leave it the less sugar the finished product will have, but left too long, the grains will consume all the sugar, starve to death and die.   Yeah, use raw sugar, organic sugar, turbinado, brown, coconut sugar, all kinds, but DO NOT USE honey.  Plain old refined sugar works great for me.

After the brewing period, strain off the grains and restart stage one again brewing a new batch with
sugar water and the grains in a warm spot.

Ripening    Ripen the strained water by funneling the strained liquid into a plastic bottle that can be tightly capped.  Add a little juice or fruit for flavoring (as much as 1/3 to -2/3 ratio of juice to kefir water,) and let it sit a day in a warm place to let the microscopic grains further consume the newly added sugar and begin to effervesce. (CO2 is being produced and captured in the capped jug.)

Storage/bottling.    After a day or two, the bottle may bulge.  (This is why I use food-grade plastic bottles.) Carefully burp the bottle of liquid and place it in cold storage--freezer or fridge until you drink it all gone.   (Yes, I've had it blow forth like coke and mentos.)