Fermented foods, part 2: Kefir

The last post addressed the dearth of information on this blog on my yogurt making habit, which has been going on pretty much continuously for the last eight years. This one talks about my first steps with kefir.

I can't recall how I started getting interested in kefir. Most of the web sites that turn up in a google search turn up vendors. Here is one site that is just useful information.

Kefir is fermented milk (usually) product. I say usually, since the cultures are used to ferment other food liquids, such as sugar water or coconut milk. Unlike yogurt, where I can just inoculate the milk with the culture from a previous batch, I need to use kefir grains, a symbiotic colony of various yeasts and bacteria, to culture the milk.

After a brief search, I could not locate kefir grains, live, dehydrated, or otherwise, in any of the local health food stores. Only premade, flavored kefir beverages. So I was forced to order my grains online. I finally settled on buying from someone in Idaho on eBay.

I order on Friday, they arrived on Monday, pretty sweet. They came in a plastic ziplock baggie, with some milk, inside of another ziplog bag, in a bubble wrap envelope, with instructions, a round coffee filter, and a rubber band.

Now, you might be concerned that milk traveling by snail mail, without any sort of cooling, would be pretty funky on arrival. That was not the case. There was pretty much no odor at all.

As soon as I got home with it, I immediately drained the milk with a strainer, and put the approximately 3 tbs of kefir grains in a 2 cup glass jar with milk from the fridge, covered with the coffee filter, set it on the counter.

The next morning, I lift the coffee filter to check it out. I was warned it would probably take a couple of cycles before I started getting good kefir, so my expectations for drinking anything were low. But what really amazed me is that there were no off-odors when I lifted the lid. If I had left uncultured milk on the counter, it would be pretty nasty by then. (As a side note, I don't know why, but my sense of smell has gotten rather inconveniently sensitive of late.)

Since it looked pretty good, rather than discard the milk and start the next batch (which are typical instructions for reviving kefir grains), I moved it to a larger jar, and added another couple of cups of milk. Since my kitchen is a little cooler than optimal for fermenting kefir, I left it for another 24 hours.

This morning, I was ready to strain out the kefir grains, and sample the kefir. Some writers warn to uses a very fine, non-metalic strainer. This is to avoid losing the very small kefir grains. I used a fine stainless steel strainer, and found that nothing really got through, so I switched to a coarser stainless steel strainer, and still had to shake the mixture about a bit in the strainer to get out the liquid. With that, I started up a new batch of kefir in a clean glass jar. My one concern is that it appears I have to give considerably more attention to care and feeding of kefir than I do for yogurt.

I sampled my first kefir this morning. A half cup, to make sure that any digestive surprises it gave me were minimized. ;-) It was a bit sour, as expected. I added a little bit of sweetener, and found it crossed the line into too sweet very quickly, so I will have to watch for that in the future. It was also slightly gritty, as predicted by Dom above, considering I fermented at about 66 deg F. I'm hoping for a creamier product when it gets warmer. And there was that tail of fizzy flavor that I recall from commercial kefir and kombucha.

The other notable from the experiences is that after drinking the kefir, all hunger vanished, and it was another three hours before hunger distracted me again.

Fermented foods, part 1

Some time back, here or on some other blog, I talked about how easy it is to make yogurt.
See here, and here.
I've got my system down pretty well now. I still have my 1qt Salton yogurt maker.

Ingredients:

• a little less than 1 qt milk, skim, low fat, whole, or supplemented with half and half, depending on taste
• 1/2 to 1 cup of dry milk powder
• 1/8 tsp stevia powder (optional, or substitute your preferred non-sugar sweetener)
• 1-2 tbs plain yogurt

Procedure:

1. In a glass or stainless steel container mix together milk, dry milk powder, stevia
2. Place container in a water bath maintained at a slightly less than a simmer, with a digital probe thermometer in the milk
3. Maintain milk at 180 deg F for 30 min, or 190 deg F for 10 minutes. Don't let it get to 200 deg F.
4. Remove from water bath, and cool back down to under 115 deg F. 
5. Mix in yogurt.
6. Place mixture in container in yogurt maker (following manufacturer's instructions) for 4-12 hours, depending on how you like it.

Some notes on this:

• I add the dry milk powder because it makes for a thicker, more custardy yogurt
• Step 3 I learned from Harold McGee in On Food and Cooking. The heating denatures the whey proteins, which also makes for a thicker, more custardy yogurt. It's only really necessary to heat the milk to about 160 deg F to kill off any critters that might compete with the yogurt cultures.
• For my water bath, I use a slow cooker. It takes a long time, but I don't have to pay close attention to the process, the way I would with a water bath on the stove. I short-cut the process some by boiling the water before I stick it in the slow cooker, and heating up the milk mixture in the microwave. If I wasn't going for denaturing the whey proteins, the microwaving would be sufficient, and I wouldn't need the water bath.

When it works out right, the yogurt has the thickness of greek yogurt, and a texture similar to flan.

Fast food versus Healthy Food

Came across a discussion of food perception on wise bread. I take issue with fast food restaurant versus healthy restaurant, where french and italian food is included in healthy. Replace 'healthy' with 'fancy' in the article, and it is all more sensible. Anyone who goes to a restaurant that doesn't publish nutritional information can't assume that the food meets or doesn't meet any dietary guidelines. What's in the salad dressing? Are they using whole milk cheese or skim milk cheese. Just how much oil or butter was used to pan fry that dish? For example, american's tend to think of asian food as healthy. Having cooked chinese food for the last eight years, knowing what my recipes call for, and assuming short cuts on the part of restaurants, I'm no better off than eating typical american fare. If it's creamy soup, it being Thai doesn't mean the cream will have fewer calories.

Cold Brewed Coffee

I came across a foodie blog entry about cold-brewed coffee, and thought I might give it a try. I had tried cold-brewed tea in the past. This was especially handy for green tea, which becomes rather nasty when steeped too long in hot water. Similar claims were made for cold-brewed coffee, that it is not bitter like hot-brewed, and has lower acidity. Claims on caffeine content varied all over the place, though, as I googled cold-brewed coffee. My dentist nags me about the acid in coffee etching my teeth, so this by itself made it worth a try.

Now, it's not so hot around here that I need iced coffee, so my plan was make some cold-brew, and then heat it in the microwave. I added 1 1/2 cups of coarse ground coffee to 6 cups of water, stirred, and left it in the fridge for about 24 hours. Then I filtered, first with a sieve, then with a metal coffee filter. Paper filters got clogged up too fast.

To look at, the coffee looked a little watery. Also, I guess because I am used to bitter coffee, it tasted kind of weak. So, in spite of recommendations to use a 1-1 dilution, I microwaved a full strength cup for a minute, and added my usual cream and sweetener. I would have to say that while I don't see much reason to change to cold-brewed from a flavor perspective (I'm not a coffee gourmet), I definitely got an enhanced caffeine kick this morning. This may be the first time I have felt a caffeine buzz in twenty years.

Good to the last drop - The Boston Globe

Good to the last drop - The Boston Globe
Mmmm... coffee. The addiction I just can't break. The only one complaining about my coffee drinking now is my dentist, who tells me it is too acidic.

Redemption of a failed culinary experiment

Last night I tried a new dish, chinese teriyaki chicken strips. 

• I marinated chicken breast strips in 
  
  • 4oz Shaoshing cooking wine,
  
  
  • 4 oz soy sauce,
  
  
  • 2 T sugar,
  
  
  • 1T grated ginger.


• Stir-fried chicken till almost cooked


• Added marinated and cooked until sauce thickened 

Unfortunately, my wok was too small for the amount of chicken. Next time I cook in batches. The chicken came out dry, although my daughter said the flavor was good.

Redemption of the dish came with lunch today. I made a sauce from duck fat, chicken stock, and a little Old Bay Seasoning, and added the chicken to it. With a slice of home-baked bread, it made for a very indulgent lunch. 

What defines organic food?

I was reading an article today about a new "green" pesticide that could be used on certified organic crops, and it set me to wondering. I used to use tobacco tea as a pesticide, but the recent onset of problems for honey bees made me reconsider the use of any wide spectrum pesticide. When I hear about "green" pesticides and "green" herbicides, I wonder about long term sustainability. I think we need another term, now. I think it would be more responsible to eat GM produce than that produced with wide spectrum pesticides, no matter how "green".