Does anyone here make their own kefir?

[housewolf]

I found out that homemade kefir has many more probiotics than what the commercial brands contain a few months ago. Did some research and found out how to do it - no, it's not as simple as inculcating some milk with kefir and letting it sit as you do with yogurt. Instead, there are these things called "kefir grains" that both are produced by the kefiring process and produce the kefir. They're interesting little things - they sort of look like little cauliflower florets, and they grow and produce new "babies" during the kefiring process, then you strain them out which gives you your kefir, recover the grains with new liquid and set them to fermenting again. (There is something available called "kefir powder" too, but I understand that after several kefirings they lose potency and die out).

There are 2 kinds of kefir grains - milk grains and water grains. Water grains give you kind of a fizzy water substance that takes to may different flavoring agents (fruit, ginger, juice, etc). I've only worked with milk grains though, and I'm learning how to get a good kefir from them. I haven't gotten anything as thick and rich as the commercial product yet - but then, all the commercial kefir I've had contains inulin as a thickener, and is more like a liquidy yogurt. My kefir hasn't quite gotten to that consisency yet, although it's thicker than milk and of course its richness is determined by the grade of milk that you use.

I'm reading a lot online about it plus 3 different Yahoo groups, and some people on the list fave about the health benefits they've received from making their own kefir - from curing lactose intolerance to all sorts of digestive disturbances to a variety of other conditions.

Anyway, I was just wondering if anyone else here was making their own kefir?

Anybody?

[Warpy]

1. I never used kefir grains

I just inoculated the milk (goat's milk in glass bottles) with some kefir containing live cultures and let it sit on the kitchen counter until it thickened. Kefir grains will work their magic in 8-12 hours, depending on ambient temperature. The way I did it required 20-24 hours.

It was wonderful whizzed with strawberries and a little sweetener.