Water Kefir

Water Kefir. Tibicos. African Bees. These are all the names for the same bacteria and yeast colonies used to make water Kefir. You may never have heard of water kefir, only knowing about it's more famous cousin, milk kefir. But like it's more gad-about cousin, water kefir is a wealth of gut healing, happy tummy making probiotics. Many folks drink it to replace soda in their diet. I like it because it tastes really good and gives me a probiotic boost at a fraction of the cost of probiotic supplements. It is also a great creative outlet for my disposessed chef. I can play around with flavors for pennies.

 Here are the water kefir grains. They look different from the milk kefir because these grains eat sucrose/glucose instead of lactose, which is eaten by the milk grains. They look like the crystals you make smelly jelly from, or use to hydrate very dry garden soil. My husband had a less charitable analogy, something made by Walter White. These are rehydrated grains I bought from Cultures for Health. Their website has great information on water kefir and how to rehydrate and use it. Basically I soaked the dehydrated grains in a sugar water solution for 3 days then poured the sugar water off. My kefir was now ready to get to work.

I made up a new sugar water solution and when it was room temp, I added the grains to it, put in a slice of lemon because it gives it a nice flavor and Dom Anfiteatro, the Kefir Guru of the WORLD said to. Then I let it sit for 2 days.

After the 2 days, I strained the grains out and put the liquid into flip top bottles. I added elderberries to one bottle and hibiscus flowers to another. Then I let them sit out for another 24 hours, burping them every 10 hrs or so.

After the 24 hours I strained the herbs out and then drank the kefir. It was yummy. I liked the elder, but I really liked the hibiscus.

this pix above is elderberry water kefir.

 And there you have it. Homemade, healthy soda-like drinks. I'm going to keep experimenting with different flavor combinations. It's fun to see what tastes good and what is nasty. Nothing nasty so far.

Here is a recap of the recipe:

4C filtered water

1/4C sugar

10 drops liquid minerals

slice of lemon

3-4 T water kefir Grains.

Boil water, add sugar to mason jar and add boiling water to disolve. Add filtered water to make 4 cups. Let cool to room temp. Add in grains and lemon slice. Cap with an airlock cap and let sit for 24-72 hours at room temp. The higher the room temp the quicker the kefir will ferment.

 How do you know when it is ready? Give the kefir a taste and if it is significantly less sweet than when you started, you are good to go. If not, let it sit a little more.  Drink water kefir plain if you like but most prefer to ferment it for a second time with flavorings. Add desired flavors, Fruit fresh or dried, spices or extracts to individual swing top bottles and let sit out for another 24 hours, burping the bottles every 12-24 hours depending on the temp and the sugar content of the flavoring. More sugar, more burping. After 24 hours toss the bottles in the fridge and let cool down. To enjoy one of these bad boys, open carefully over the sink in case there was excessive carbonation and it volcanoes all over the place. You might even want to put the second fermentation process in a cooler or other container. I had a bottle burst at 3 AM filled with elderberries. I was awoken by a loud POP and found Glass, berries and liquid all over my kitchen. Not a very fun time. But you will be much smarter than I. I can tell that already.

milk kefir!

Milk Kefir!  For my next installment of jarred weirdness I present to you a dairy delight. Fermented milk kefir. I was introduced to this elixir again by Susun Weed in 1994. She had these things called Tara or Tibetan Mushrooms sitting in this thick, viscous jar of goats milk.  After straining out the grains as they are called she poured me a small glass of the tart, sour stuff. It glided down my throat with a slight effervescence. It tickled my nose and I burped and fell head over heels in love. I'm a dairy hound anyway and this new way to get my lactose fix had me over the moon. I believe that diary can be a good human food for many people. Some react poorly to it but many can process it just fine and get great benefit from it's nutritional profile. I can't drink fluid cows milk straight but I can drink goats milk and cultured cow milk products just fine. Milk kefir really tastes great to me and has so much to offer health wise. After leaving Susun with a gift of grains I fermented them at home for quite some time until either they got thrown out by accident or pitched when we moved. I was still curious about kefir so I did some research. This was the dawn of the internet, the days of alt.net groups and spider searches so it took me some time to find what I was looking for but find it I did. I found the MOTHERLODE of information about Kefir in the webpages of one Dom or Dominic N Anfiteatro, a Kefir Guru from Down Under. This was about 1999 and I had found a man obsessed. His love of kefir had produced the most comprehensive site of information on the stuff ever collected. Dom's site was the go to place for information about kefir. History, Cultural relevance, recipes, techniques were all collected on Dom's site. He also had links to find folks to share grains around the world. I could repeat what I found but that would deny you the delight of perusing his pages. It has grown into an amazing, labrynthine treasure trove of information and I am in awe of the love and dedication to Kefir and things fermented Dom has shared with the world. Now days you can find milk kefir on sale at regular grocery stores touting it's probiotic goodness. That's wonderful, more people can get to know about this wonderful food this way but often the stuff you can buy is full of things I don't want to eat; sugar, artificial colors, gums and stabilizers. And of course, it's expensive. I can make my own kefir at a fraction of the cost of store bought.

Here are the kefir grains. They are not grain based but a combo of yeasts and bacteria that eat lactose and poop out lactic acid and various other probiotic goodies that are great for the human gut. If you are curious about the composition of Kefir click here .  You let the milk and grains mingle at room temp for about 24 hours then strain the kefir off, eat the liquid and use the grains for your next batch of Kefir. They will keep making you kefiry goodness for years with loving attention.

Above you can see the kefir sitting out fermenting. The grains are in the top photo processing the milk. in the bottom photo you can see the separation of the milk proteins from the whey after sitting for 24 hours. After straining I am left with this creamy, tart, thick liquid. I refridgerate mine and drink in smoothies or plain. Sometimes I strain the kefir through a fine weave cloth and make labneh cheese but most often I drink it .

 To get your own kefir grains you could check out Dom's sharing page, go to Facebook and look for Kefir sharing groups or do a web search for companies that sell kefir grains. I am familiar with Cultures for Health, GEM cultures and Happy Herbalist. There are others. eBay might be a fruitful place to check.

To recap, making kilk kefir is stone easy. Obtain kefir grains. put them in a jar and fill the jar with about .5-1 C milk for each T grains or according to the package instructions. Cover jar with a cloth and rubber band to keep the creepie crawlies and flying bugs out. Let sit at room temp (60-80) for about 24 hours. The warmer the room , the faster the ferment happens. Strain the milk off with a plastic strainer ( ideal) or a Stainless Steel one if that's all you have.  Place the strained grains back in the jar and cover with fresh milk and repeat. Some folks will close the jar and let it sit out for another 24 hours at room temp for a second fermentation which decreases the amount of lactose left in the kefir and increases the vitamin profile. I think it is too sour that way so I just put my jar in the fridge straight away.

 Enjoy your kefir however you would eat yogurt. Enjoy!

More on Kombucha

I first had kombucha at the amazing Wise Woman Center in Woodstock NY run by the indefatigable Susun Weed. There on the counter was a bucket with this evil looking blob floating in a brown liquid that smelled like vinegar. I thought it was a vinegar mother, the bacteria colony that makes vinegar. But a sign said kombucha. I wondered what kind of cha, or tea in Japanese, could be made from Kombu, a type of seaweed. I sure didn't see anything it that murk that looked like kombu. Susun said it was not kombu but a fermented tea of Red Raspberry leaf and spearmint. It was a thing handed down from grandmother to daughter for at least the last 1000 years and it was good for the gut and the immune system. I could attest that it looked handed down for a thousand years. It was spooky looking. There was this huge, flat pancake looking thing floating in liquid surrounded by tiny bubbles. "Have a sip" she said. I'm not one to shrink away from a challenge and I have always said I'd try any food so long as it was not alive going down my throat, so I said "ok." This batch was aged so it was vinegary. Not unpleasant, just sharp and ever so slightly effervescent. I enjoyed it. On my departure from the center 6 weeks later I was armed with a baby kombucha mother and some Tara grains. More on that later. I kept brewing the kombucha tea at my home. Each batch made a new colony that I gave to friends and co workers at the pharmacy I worked for. One day I got a call at work from the local newspaper. The reporter had heard I was making this weird brew that some folks were calling a health miracle. She wanted to see it and interview me. I made no claims that this stuff was a health tonic. I have always asserted that it was a tasty self replicating brew that has been around for at least 1000 years. This was 1995. I got in the paper and became know as the kombucha woman at the Pharmacy. The next year I moved from WI where I was living to MD then to TX and I gave up my beloved Kombucha. There was no way I could keep up with the upkeep the brew needed in my new living situation. Besides, the FDA was telling folks that Kombucha was dangerous. I knew that it was not dangerous if you didn't drink gallons of it at a time. Moderation. But anyway, my circumstances prevented me from brewing it for the next 16 years.
 Imagine my surprise when I saw a bottle of GT Kombucha in the local Whole Foods store in about 2009. I laughed at the price but bought a bottle anyway because I had no idea where to get a mother to brew my own. The GT stuff was good but I liked my stuff better. Then there was a crackdown in 2010. Somehow the word got out that Kombucha was alcoholic. It is fermented but it is not alcoholic, it ferments to Acetic acid, not alcohol in more than .5-,8%, no more than fruit juice sitting in the fridge for a week. After the kerfuffle died down, Kombucha was available in the store but I refused to pay the exorbitant prices for it. In 2014 I finally got in a position to brew my own stuff again. I bought a bottle of the store bought kombucha, forever hereafter known as booch, and let it sit out for a week until a SCOBY or mother grew on it and then fermented my own batch of green tea kombucha. It was like seeing an old friend. I liked the taste but looking online showed me that folks were doing all sorts of cool things with their kombucha brews. There was a second fermentation revolution going on and flavors I couldn't imagine were being created. By adding fruit or spices and herbs to the 2nd fermentation of Kombucha, amazing flavors where being produced. Since Kombucha was always about the taste first and the gut soothing properites of the brew second I was in hog heaven. This opened up a vast new arena with which I could play! And play I have! So far I have only made 2 flavored brews but I have so many ideas floating in my head. Here are pix of my latest creations, truly weird shit in jars.

 

Kombucha is made very easily once you have gotten a SCOBY or Symbiotic Colony of Bacteria and Yeast. You can google these online, get them from Ebay or get them from a friend. Then you make a super sweet tea solution, add the SCOBY, then wait. It takes about 7-14 days for the SCOBY to ferment the brew. I start tasting around day 6 so it does not get too vinegary. Then I pull off all but 2 C into other bottles. The plain stuff goes right into the fridge. The flavored stuff gets put into bottles( smaller re-used GT bottles) and then sits out for 2 more days then goes into the fridge. When the stuff is cooled off I drink it. Happy tummy and tongue happen.

Kombucha basic recipe

16 C water

2-3T black tea

1C white sugar

2c pre-existing kombucha 

1 SCOBY

gallon jar w spigot (or not)

coffee filter 

rubber band

Boil the water, put tea & sugar in a container. ( I use a plastic gallon pitcher from Walmart to brew). add hot water and let steep for at least 10 min. I let my stuff sit until the water is room temp. If you can't boil the full 16 cups at once boil what you can then fill the rest of the way with cool water to make 16 cups water total. Let this come to room temp. Strain and  Pour into  brew jug. Add SCOBY and pre-existing kombucha tea. Cover with coffee filter and secure with a rubber band to keep fruit flies and other nasties out. Let sit 7-14 days, Start tasting on day 6 so you can see when you like the taste. Decant into a jar and sit in the fridge. Drink 4-10 oz a day or as desired.

For 2nd fermantation, get smaller bottles. Put fruit or herbs or spices in bottles. fill with Kombucha, let sit at room temp for up to 48 more hours then refirdgerate. Twist open the tops of the bottles every 12 or so hours so that the gas does not build up and explode the jars.