MILK KEFIR
I’d like to tell you about my experience making milk kefir, a fermented milk product like yogurt but a lot more nourishing than yogurt. It’s not thick, like the store-bought yogurt, but that wasn’t a surprise to me. I had made yogurt before so I knew it’s naturally more liquidy. I rarely bought flavoured yogurt (with sweet ‘jam’ at the bottom of the container) or the low-fat yogurt.
To be exact, yogurt and milk kefir are probiotics. Yogurt contains three beneficial bacteria which help the gut, but these are ‘transient’ which means that they help with digestion and cleaning the gut, but they pass through the gut. Kefir contains about 23 beneficial bacteria plus 9 different strains of yeast. Not only is kefir more easily absorbed by the intestine, but the beneficial bacteria in kefir can colonize the intestinal tract, which means they stay in the gut and continue to eliminate pathogens. People who are lactose intolerant can tolerate milk kefir better than yogurt because the lactose (milk sugar) is digested better by the many beneficial bacteria in kefir.
“Many health claims exist for kefir, including the enhancement of the immune system and improved digestive health, particularly with regard to lactose digestion,” said Steven Hertzler, a 2003 study co-author awho was an assistant professor of medical dietetics at Ohio State University.
All this to say that I stopped buying yogurt (or making my own) and changed to milk kefir. I started about 8 years ago, when I found someone in Vancouver selling milk kefir grains on Craig’s list. I paid $5 and she gave me the kefir grains in milk, already fermented, so I was able to taste it right away. Since then, I’ve made whole cow milk kefir and whole goat milk kefir and the difference is remarkable. Goat milk is creamier — so is the goat milk kefir. These days, you can buy grass-fed milk that comes from Donia Farms in Surrey and is sold at Save-On-Foods. If you look them up, you can see many fields of grass around their farm.
When I started to eat more fermented foods, I noticed a big improvement in my gut health. Also, it’s only fair to say, I had retired from a stressful job, so I guess that also helped. To make the kefir, you just add milk to the kefir grains, cover the jar with a coffee filter and leave it on the counter for 24 hours. Then you remove the grains and put them in the fridge until you want to make another batch. At one point, I was making a new batch almost every day and saving what I couldn’t eat until the next day. But now I make a smaller quantity and, after taking the grains out, I add frozen berries or some other fruit and leave it on the counter to ‘ferment’ until the next day.
There’s only one problem: kefir grains grow (or multiply) so you need to give some away or find someone who has hens, to eat them! Very nutritious!
Fiona