Make your own fresh Kefir!

How to make your own fresh Kefir milk at home in your spare time! For cheap, even!

Kefir is a wonderful and ancient cultured milk product which contains loads of friendly bacteria of several strains, good for your gut. Good Kefir is slightly thick and has a tang like a great buttermilk, but the flavor is just a little different. There is really not much to making Kefir, just a few points, and of course you have to have the grains. Please note: as Dom points out on his marvelous page, powdered starter cultures do NOT have what you need to produce REAL Kefir.

Like making Kombucha or Kim Chee or yogurt yourself, the first couple of times you do it you'll be looking at the instructions with great concentration, but after that it will become second nature and part of your routine.

Kefir Grains
Kefir Grains look like little pieces of cauliflower, only they are soft and rubbery. They do increase in time and you will have to divide them. There are quite a few sources for Kefir Grains on the net. I got mine from a friend. How you'll know it's time to divide them is that the Kefir will "make" in a very short time. I don't raise Kefir for sale as the demand is too small and it has to be watched daily, not like Kombucha which will be very happy left alone for a couple of weeks.

Preliminaries
To make Kefir I use wide-mouth 2-quart canning jars. They are easy to clean. For my method of making Kefir you will need two of them. I had to look quite a while before I found the 2-quart ones with a wide mouth. You should be able to find them at a large old-fashioned hardware store that carries canning supplies. They were about $2 apiece. I had to buy a case of 6, but I immediately found uses for them holding trail mix, rice, etc., as well as using them to make Kim Chee and Kefir. Plus two of my friends went crazy when they saw them and I sold two jars. Now I need more! They hold just the right amount of Kefir for me for 2 days. Also, there is a marvelous plastic funnel/colander that I use to strain my finished Kefir, which just fits into the wide mouth and stays put. It's called BigMouth. I found the BigMouth online here at this marvelous canning site: http://www.canningpantry.com/canning-funnel1.html 

It has a snap-in sieve and is a whiz to clean. If you can't find it, you can use a plastic colander with small holes or a nylon large-mesh sieve. I tried a metal sieve but it seemed to impart a flavor to the Kefir which I didn't like. Bulletin: 

What milk to use
You can use any milk for Kefir. I imagine Kefir made from raw milk from your own goat or cow would be absolute heaven. You can use reconstituted powdered milk and add a bit of whipping cream after it's made, for flavor. It comes out wonderfully. Put 3 cups of water in the blender, add 1 1/3 cups of dry powdered skim milk, mix it on LOW till thoroughly blended, let it sit for a moment, and add water to make 4 cups. I add the whipping cream, maybe a quarter to a third of a cup, after the Kefir is finished.

Method
Put 4-6 cups of milk in one of your 2-quart wide mouth jars. Add your Kefir Grains, put on the lid and give it a shake to mix. The Kefir Grains will rise to the top. Set the jar on the counter in a glass baking dish 8x8 and give it a mixing swirl or shake two or three times a day. I make mine with the lid on. It's done when you see it getting a little thick and when the milk seems to kind of clump around the grains at the top. This can take anywhere from overnight to the next late morning, down to just a few hours if you have a lot of grains. It also depends on the temperature. Warmer = faster. During this time the fermentation will produce a little gas, so loosen the lid from time to time to let it out. I wait for mine until the top one-fourth of the milk is trying to separate right after I shake it. By then you have a huge number of friendly flora and it's time to harvest. Take your other 2-quart wide mouth jar and set it in the sink. Set the Big Mouth funnel in the jar, making sure the sieve part is completely snapped in. Shake the Kefir one last time and start pouring it in the funnel. You will have to use a wooden spoon to pull the Kefir Grains away from the sieve. It will take a couple of minutes to strain the whole four cups. Keep pulling the grains away from the sieve until there is almost no Kefir left on them, and set the strainer in a bowl for now. There in the jar is your fresh Kefir! I add the whipping cream at this point and shake. You can drink some now (I usually can't wait) or just put a clean lid on it and refrigerate. It will tend to develop a bit more tang in the refrigerator. Kefir is like buttermilk in that it will cling to the side of the jar or glass. If it doesn't, you didn't let it culture long enough.

If you are going to make more Kefir immediately, wash the jar you just poured it out of, put in new milk and the grains from the sieve, and set it on the counter to start. If you will be waiting a couple of days before making your next batch, place the grains in enough milk to cover them plus a little more and place in the refrigerator. I don't know how long they keep as mine never stay in there longer than 2-3 days.

If you want more information, I recommend most highly a visit to this Australian site, which contains more than I even thought existed about Kefir!! Thanks to Dom for permission to place the link.

And thanks to Mary S, who asked the right questions for me to find the new info for both of us!!

©2008 Nancy Adams 

Page last edited on 1-30-08