kefir grains

[bernardsmith]

What do you do with the kefir grains that keep on growing and which you then have to remove to better control their work on the milk? I basically use my grains to make kefir to ripen milk I use for cheese. I now have about 16g of grains that I have dried (and coated with milk powder) and placed in my fridge. So I am growing about this quantity almost every month. What do you do with your dried grains? What I am thinking of doing - but as yet I have neither the equipment nor the skill-set is to try to isolate and culture K-marxianus from the grains and so grow a yeast that can produce ethanol from lactose - and so more effectively transform my whey into wine. But what do you do with the excess grains?

 

[Miraculix]

What do you do with the kefir grains that keep on growing and which you then have to remove to better control their work on the milk? I basically use my grains to make kefir to ripen milk I use for cheese. I now have about 16g of grains that I have dried (and coated with milk powder) and placed in my fridge. So I am growing about this quantity almost every month. What do you do with your dried grains? What I am thinking of doing - but as yet I have neither the equipment nor the skill-set is to try to isolate and culture K-marxianus from the grains and so grow a yeast that can produce ethanol from lactose - and so more effectively transform my whey into wine. But what do you do with the excess grains?

Same Problem, no answer.

Can you please explain a bit how you use kefir during cheese making? Never heard of that before!

 

[bernardsmith]

So here's the thing: kefir contains a few dozen bacterial and yeast cultures and some are mesophilic (preferring moderate temperatures) and some are thermophilic (preferring hot temperatures). What I do is strain out the grains from the (about a cup of) kefir that the grains have been working on for the past 24 hours and use that kefir to inoculate the milk. This milk can then make many varieties of cheese from alpine to parmesan to cheddar to brie (kefir also contains p. candidum). Bottom line is that for many varieties of cheese I don't need to buy lab cultured packages to inoculate my cheese but can use the kefir I make.

The grains contain this consortium of cultures but I am not sure that store bought kefir (the cultured milk product ) always contains this range of cultures OR even if it does that those cultures in the milk are still viable and active (can you use store bought kefir to make more kefir? I don't know).

That said, I don't drink the kefir that I need to make to keep the grains fed. what I do with that is collect enough kefir until I have about 1 gallon (takes me about a month) and I simply drain the curds, add some herbs and salt and press them under about 50 lbs of weight for about 3 days to make a hard, rennetless, kefir cheese (I think the curds are too acidic to play nicely with the rennet).

What I would love to do with the extra grains (but I have neither the equipment nor the skill set) is use them to isolate and then culture K. Marxianus from the consortium. K. Marxianus is a yeast that can make ethanol (alcohol) from lactose (whey) and so I could make wine FROM the whey from the cheese I make rather than ferment ON the lactose which is what I typically do.