My new "pet"

As I quipped this week to a co-worker, my ideal pet is a single-celled organism. My kitchen is a great place to keep them. I have managed to keep a sourdough starter alive and still sweet for about a year, and it is still yeasty enough to raise bread. The latest addition to the menagerie is a kefir (kəˈfɪər/ kə-FEER) culture, which I purchased dry at a local natural foods store and rehydrated at home. Kefir is a bacterial culture that ferments milk. It has been used for centuries to make milk safe to store for longer periods than fresh milk can keep. Other advantages are that the process adds to the vitamin and probiotics content of milk and reduces the amount of lactose, since the kefir bacteria feed on the lactose sugar.

After only two changes of milk, my kefir "grains" started producing kefir, and, if I wasn't careful to monitor more than once a day, curds that I then had to turn into cheese. Here is a kefir grain (the little protein mass at the top left that has the culture in/on it that starts fermenting the milk), floating on a new batch of kefir:

Care and feeding of kefir is much easier than looking after, say, a dog, but it has added several minutes of prep work to my day. I'm regularly changing jars from active kefir fermentation on the kitchen counter to storage jars in the refrigerator, moving extra kefir grains to the storage vessel in the refrigerator, sterilizing containers and utensils at each step. It's not a lot of work, but it is something that requires a little bit of attention each day unless I take a few days off and put all the kefir and grains in cold storage.

The flavor and texture of kefir is similar to a very thin yogurt. Uses I've put it to so far:
1. pouring on morning cereal instead of milk
2. in a salad dressing
3. making a spreadable cheese
4. putting the cheese into cooked dishes
5. mixed with juice as a breakfast drink

Here is a jar of kitchen-counter actively-fermenting kefir:

I keep eating the kefir cheese before I get a picture of it. Just imagine spreadable goat cheese like chevre, and that's pretty much what I'm getting when I strain a batch of over-curdled kefir in a cheesecloth for a day. It tastes great with the addition of a little salt and some dried or fresh herbs. If I heat little chunks of the cheese, it changes texture to something like a fresh cheese curd.

In a couple of weeks, I'm hosting a workshop at my place about fermented and cultured foods, through the Meetup group Radical Homemakers of Bloomington-Normal. I'll give away starter kefir grains to those who attend. I also have sourdough starter available, and a friend said she'd bring kombucha culture for fermenting tea.