How to Get More Kefir from Powdered Kefir Starter

It probably goes without saying that I am interested in sustainable food ways. I like nourishing food that we can make over and over again from simple ingredients. I like making things myself and believe that homemade anything is better than store-bought everything. I like to reduce waste in my kitchen and in my landfill.

So you might think that something like a powdered kefir culture wouldn’t make it into my kitchen on a regular basis, at least not when milk kefir grains are available. Right now I actually have both milk kefir grains and powdered milk kefir culture creating quarts and quarts of probiotic goodness. I’ll get to the reasons I’m a fan of this powdered kefir culture in a minute, but first let me tell you something else that I recently figured out.

I’m sure I’m the last person to have thought of this, but just in case I’m not, here’s how I am making way more milk kefir than I initially thought I could get out of a single packet of kefir starter.

Generally speaking, powdered kefir culture is cultured and then used as the culture to make subsequent batches. Eventually the culture goes weak or something infiltrates it and you are no longer culturing kefir. You’ll notice a change in consistency or smell and then you open up a new packet and start over.

In this way, assuming you end up making four quarts from a kefir culture packet, you would get maybe four gallons of kefir from an entire package, assuming it comes with four packets (a rough average). This is actually a significant amount of kefir and well worth the price, when you consider what you might pay at the store for sub-par kefir.

This might actually be plenty of kefir for you, so you wouldn’t even consider making more. If you have a larger family, or just drink a ton of kefir – both of which are realities in our home – then you may want to try to make even more kefir at a time. I sure did.

In order to make more kefir from a single culturing I simply take two quarts of fresh goat milk and add the recommended amount of kefir to each quart. So on the second culturing I am getting a half-gallon (or more!) of kefir. You could actually do even more than this, but I find that keeping the quarts separate helps. So you could realistically get a gallon of kefir for each subsequent culturing. Going with the analogy above, we would then get 16 gallons of kefir from a single package of starter, which is four times what I initially assumed I could make! The main issue is then either consuming the kefir in time or having enough storage space in your refrigerator to store as much kefir as possible.

One final tip that I have found helpful is that the powdered kefir cultures I have worked with seem to give you more subsequent culturings when the kefir is used immediately to make the next batch. So, as soon as a batch is done culturing and is tangy and thick, I plop that into 2-4 new quarts of milk for my next culturing. Somehow the lack of refrigeration and time spent since the initial culturing seems to result in a stronger culture.

I should also mention that the reason that I really like the powdered kefir culture is that it is really simple to use, especially in times of stress or flux. With a new baby entering our home soon, I am glad to have something on hand that is simple enough to use – with no possible “killing” of the mother culture – which will provide for some deep nourishment during an intense and blessed time of transition for our family.

Do you use powdered kefir culture? Have any tips?

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Ginger Tooth Powder

This tooth powder recipe is great for people who don’t care for mint flavor.

Ingredients:

• 2 tablespoon baking soda
• 1 tablespoon xylitol
• ½ teaspoons ginger powder
• ¼ teaspoons sea salt

Instructions:

1. Mix ingredients well and powder in a coffee grinder or mortar and pestle.
2. Store in a sealed jar.

How to Use Ginger Tooth Powder:

1. Scoop approximately ¼ teaspoon tooth powder into your hand.
2. Using a wet brush, scrub up the powder from your hand and brush as usual.

Makes about ¼ cup

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Gluten-free Sourdough Chocolate Chip Cookies

Free Sourdough Starter ($12.99 value) shipped with every order placed 12/13/15 to 12/16/15

This gluten-free chocolate chip cookie recipe is a great way to use discarded starter. Sour the dough until they are as tangy as you like, or make them immediately if you’re in a hurry.

Ingredients:

• ½ cup butter, very soft
• ½ cup gluten-free sourdough starter
• ¾ cup superfine white rice flour
• ¼ cup sorghum flour
• ½ cup potato or tapioca starch
• ½ teaspoon xanthan gum
• 2 eggs
• ½ cup honey
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• ½ teaspoon salt
• ½ cup chocolate chips
• 1 teaspoon baking soda

Instructions:

1. Mix butter and sourdough starter together in a medium bowl beating until well combined. Add superfine rice flour, sorghum flour, potato starch, and xanthan gum and mix together until a very stiff dough comes together. If the dough doesn’t reach this stage, add a little bit more sorghum flour until it does.
2. Cover bowl and sour 4-8 hours, if souring is desired.
3. Preheat oven to 375°F. Grease baking sheet with butter or cover with parchment paper.
4. In a small bowl, beat eggs. Add honey, vanilla, and salt; mix well. Blend mixture into the soured dough. Pour chocolate chips over the mixture and sprinkle the baking soda on top.
5. Blend until everything is well combined. Drop dough by the spoonful onto prepared baking sheet. Bake approximately 12 minutes, or until cookies are just set on top and golden-brown on the bottom.
6. Cool briefly on baking sheet before transferring to cooling rack.

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Bottling My Homemade Cider

Of all the steps involved in home brewing beer or cider, bottling is often the most intimidating part. I certainly experienced a little pre-bottling anxiety myself. However, I have good news! After all was said and done, and my fridge overfloweth with fine cider, bottling really didn’t seem like such a big deal anymore. Sure, it’s going to be a little messy and it takes some time, but my advice is to try to enjoy the process and focus on the imminent rewards. So put on some music or a podcast, roll up your sleeves, and get to it.

First, let’s talk bottles. Since this was my first round of making cider ever, I really wanted to pull out all the stops. I wanted a carbonated dry product that I could reseal if I didn’t want to drink an entire bottle at once. With these considerations in mind, I opted for 16 ounce Grolsch-Style flip-top bottles. However, when bottling day came, I quickly realized I didn’t have enough bottles on hand. I lucked out when I ran into some 64 ounce growlers at a local supply store with a screw top lid. While these saved my bacon in this case, I can’t say I really recommend them. They didn’t produce quite the same amount of carbonation and once opened, you were pretty well committed to drinking it all at once. They have been a hit at parties, though! With bottles and growlers ready to go, I mixed my sanitizing solution and prepared my bottling station. I decided to use a big plastic tub for submerging all of my bottles and growlers and then placed them on a dish rack (dedicated to brewing bottles only) to dry in batches.

Next, I cleared and sanitized plenty of counter space to work with and opened my pouch of dextrose to use as a priming sugar for my bottles. At this point, I did something that in retrospect was a batch-saving idea – I tasted a little cup of the cider. The cider was pretty ok: dry, flavorful, clean and alcoholic, but there was no trace of sweetness at this point. I probably let my first fermentation go a day or two longer than I should have, but I was relying on my hydrometer to steer me correctly. Tasting the cider, I determined that using dextrose alone as a priming sugar would only create a carbonated version of what I was drinking. I needed a somewhat non-fermentable sugar and decided maple syrup would be the best choice. Having used some maple syrup in the past as a priming sugar for brewing beer, I knew from experience that it would ferment only somewhat and impart a sweet syrupy flavor to the beer. It isn’t quite fermentable enough on its own to produce nice carbonation, but in combination with the dextrose I gambled that it would create a dry, semi-sweet, carbonated cider in the end. This gamble really ended up paying off in the end.

Once my bottles had air dried completely, I sanitized my autosiphon and experimented with siphoning a little of the sanitizing solution into a separate vessel. It took a few pumps to get it going, but ultimately created a more rapid flow than I would have liked. Despite the handy plastic crimping mechanism to cease the flow, I simply wasn’t altogether comfortable using the siphon. Of course, this was my first siphoning experience in a long while and I’m sure there is an easier way to use it, but for the sake of time and cleanliness, I decided to take an alternate route. Seeing that I had a second fermentation bucket and a spare spigot, I drilled a whole in the premade spigot insert and attached my sanitized spigot to the second bucket, which of course was sanitized thoroughly as well. At this point, I simply transferred my cider from one bucket to the other, but it may be wise to have a friend help you execute this move as the bucket does have some heft when it’s full of cider. I then let the yeast settle once again to the bottom for about an hour before returning to my bottling station.

By this point, I had a fair number of my bottles sanitized and air dried to where I could start priming and filling the bottles systematically. At first, I struggled finding a way to add the dextrose to the bottles without creating a powdered mess down the sides and on my counter space. I tried using small spoons and tips of narrow knives with some success, but this made it pretty difficult to measure how much dextrose was being added to each bottle. After priming about a dozen bottles, I opted to create an easy funnel made of notebook paper. This saved me so much time and a lot of dextrose as well. I then carefully measured what I thought would be a good amount of maple syrup – probably about ½ tablespoon per bottle – into each bottle and began to carefully fill each bottle out of the spigot. I opted to set my fermenter bucket on the edge of my counter top to make it easier to use the spigot (again, it would be good to have someone help you lift it onto the counter). I found that I could fill each bottle up about ¾ of the way and then it would foam to the top. Once the foam resided, I could top it off by opening the spigot only slightly to create a slower flow and produce less foam. Once filled, I clamped each bottle top down securely and placed the bottles in a big plastic container so that on the off chance that a bottle would become super carbonated and blow the top, the container would catch the mess instead of my hardwood floors.

This turned out to be a very easy and efficient system. My wife helped by sanitizing, drying and adding the priming sugar and syrup to each bottle while I filled them with the spigot and clamped them shut. In about an hour, we had all of our growlers and bottles filled. Fortunately, the spigot sits high enough in the fermenter bucket to where the yeast can settle below it, so we didn’t run any risk of sediment in our bottles. So far, we’ve opened and drank about 75% of the bottles after they sat for an additional two weeks at room temperature and a week in the refrigerator. Each bottle has been somewhat unique in that we didn’t measure the dextrose or maple syrup with extreme precision, but all in all they have been wonderfully flavored and nicely carbonated. I haven’t detected any contamination in any of the bottles I’ve opened, which was a worry with the spigot system. Whether you use a spigot or the siphon, be sure to give yourself more time than you think to fill the bottles and expect a little bit of spillage no matter how careful you are. Personally, I find the aroma of a little spilled apple cider in my kitchen to be quite pleasant. I hope you find a way to enjoy the whole process knowing that the fruits of your labor will be well worth the effort and mess. Cheers to you and yours!

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A Closer Look: Kombucha Tea Starter Kit

“I bought this as a gift, and I couldn’t ask for a more quality product! It gave you the tools you needed (minus the sugar and jar, of course) to make your own kombucha exactly as stated. I would highly recommend this product.” -Marie

Today we are going to take a closer look at the Cultures for Health Kombucha Tea Starter Kit.

Product Highlights

Brew delicious organic kombucha at home! Save money! Commercial kombucha sells for $3+ per bottle. Using our kombucha starter culture, brew your own kombucha for $2 per gallon or less. A kombucha starter culture consists of yeast and bacteria existing in a symbiotic relationship. When combined with sweetened tea and fermented for 7 to 30 days, the resulting kombucha beverage has a slightly carbonated zing and is packed full of B vitamins.

• Gluten-free, dairy-free, and vegan.
• Reusable culture; transfer the culture from batch to batch.
• Initial batch requires 30-day culturing time. Subsequent batches culture in 7-30 days.
• With proper care, the culture can be used indefinitely to create delicious fermented tea
• Easy to make; can be flavored in a variety of ways.

This Kombucha Starter Kit includes:

• Kombucha starter culture (includes culture and 10 pH strips)
• Organic black tea (enough for the activation batch)
• Plastic mesh strainer (3.5″)
• 16-page instruction booklet, including bottling and flavoring ideas

Kombucha Instructions and Troubleshooting: 

• Instructions for using this culture are included and may be found here.
• Having trouble making kombucha? Browse our Kombucha Troubleshooting Articles or contact us for assistance.

 Kombucha Tea Starter Culture Ingredients: Organic sugar, Organic black tea, Live Active Cultures

This product contains no GMO ingredients.

Shipping Information and Shelf-life: Our Kombucha Tea Starter Culture is shipped in a dehydrated state and must be rehydrated. The starter keeps

• At room temperature (68° to 78°F): 3 to 4 weeks
• In the refrigerator (40° to 45°F): 9 months
• In the freezer (0° to 25°F): not recommended

Allergen Information:

Our Kombucha Tea Starter Culture is a gluten-free product. It is manufactured in a facility that also produces products containing soy and dairy.

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I had a great experience with Cultures for Health. The kit comes with most everything you need to brew your kombucha, and the eBook that you can download for free from the website was very informational! I hydrated my scoby in a quart size mason jar, and that first batch tasted pretty strongly like vinegar. The first batch after that (still brewing with vinegar rather than tea from the previous batch) also didn’t taste quite like kombucha that I’ve bought from the store in the past. Now, I am finally ready to bottle my third batch of kombucha (and the first batch using tea starter rather than vinegar starter) and it tastes great! I emailed and used live chat with customer service a couple times throughout the process and each time they responded quickly and were very helpful! Overall a great experience!
-Emily

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Product Q&A

Q. Once I have a culture from my first batch of kombucha How and where do I store it for the next batch. Thank you.

A. As a live culture consisting of active yeasts and bacteria, Kombucha Scobys do best if they are allowed to sit on the counter culturing one batch of sugared tea after another. However, life can interfere at times and if you are facing the possibility of needing to take a break from making Kombucha, here are some guidelines for how to take a break without damaging the Scoby: http://ift.tt/1HhhBrt

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Q. Would you recommend filtered water versus tap water for a cleaner healthier Kombucha? I’m very interested in trying this drink and the video was great. Thank you!

A. We do recommend using the best water you can. If your water supply has chlorine, you can remove it by filtering, boiling, or aeration. You can read more about choosing water for your ferments here. http://ift.tt/1lIfWGP

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Q. Does this work with any tea or only black tea?

A. While black tea is the traditional tea used for brewing kombucha, there are a variety of teas or combinations of teas that will work fine. Check the link here for further information:

http://ift.tt/1P33udO

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Learn more about the Kombucha Tea Starter Kit.

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That Time I Figured Out What Calcium Chloride Could Do For My Cheesemaking

I’ve been making cheese now for a few months. These aren’t complicated, hard cheeses of which I’m still slightly frightened of. No, my go-to options are a soft chevre and a flavorful feta. I have been making both of these exclusively with fresh goat milk and so far it’s been fun to take on another DIY kitchen project.

It all started when I received the Goat Milk Cheese Kit. I love kits like this that take the fear out of DIYing it for the first time by assembling everything that you need. Everything in that kit was familiar and got me off to a great start.

Well, everything, that is, except the calcium chloride. I had heard some vague thing about this stuff long ago and kind of figured it was like putting together a bookshelf and having one extra screw when all is said and done. It’s working, right, so I’m probably not missing out on much.

That is until I talked to my friend Tracy who is an actual cheesemaker with actual experience who actually knew about this little bottle.

She came over one day and we were sorting through some of our Cultures for Health equipment and starters. When I came across the calcium chloride she told me what she remembered it being used for. Essentially, she said you add it to store-bought cow’s milk or goat milk to firm up the curd. Do you remember how I found my goat feta to be too soft to brine and couldn’t quite figure out why? Well, after some research I found out that indeed, calcium chloride is used to help firm up the curd of goat milk cheese.

According to this article from Curd Nerd…

But it’s not just store bought milk that can benefit from Calcium Chloride. If you are using Goat’s Milk for cheese making, particularly when making hard cheeses, you may need to add Calcium Chloride to get a firm curd as Goat’s milk goes through a natural homogenization process in the animal’s body and without CaCI2 it may produce a curd that is too weak to cut properly.

Continuing on in that particular article – and cross-referencing with other online sources, I believe Calcium Chloride is used in the cases of

• Store-bought pasteurized milk which needs a boost in calcium.
• Goat milk which may have lower calcium levels than cow’s milk.
• Raw cow’s milk which may be deficient in the mineral due to poor feed quality.

It also seems that Calcium Chloride should be added only in small amounts – ¼ teaspoon per gallon of milk – and mixed with the milk before beginning the cheesemaking process.

So maybe I could make some cheese without the calcium chloride but my feta and hard cheeses might improve because of it. Which leaves me only to try it out and see what happens next.

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Fermentation Guidelines for Homebrewing Beer

The following is a guest post by Jeffrey Michael on the topic of homebrewing.  Learn more about him at the end of the post!

As the old saying goes, “Men don’t make beer. Men make wort. Yeast make beer.” Wort (pronounced vurt) is the boiled and hopped pre-beer liquid that requires the most human effort (you can read more about this in the 10-Step Brewing Guide). This is as far as an individual can go in actively “making” a beer. The next step is allowing fermentation to take control. Though less “hands on” than the brewing process, the fermentation stage is equally important in determining the final flavor of the finished product. Following the guidelines below will ensure that you help your yeast “make” the best homebrew possible.

1. Temperature control is key.

Even if you don’t have a temperature control system (such as a dedicated fermentation refrigerator or a precisely temperature-controlled room) it is still worthwhile to keep your fermenting beer as close to a target temperature as possible (as prescribed by your recipe). Some sources state that yeast get stressed and produce off-flavors if they experience temperature changes of more than 5° F in one day. Most likely a room’s temperature will change by this much from daytime to nighttime. Thus, it’s best to place the fermenting beer in a cool, insulated location, such as in a closet or in the back corner of a basement, away from direct sunlight. Since most environments are warmer than desired, placing the fermentation vessel in shallow water with a wet towel or t-shirt covering it can help lower the fermenting temperature a few degrees, and help buffer against temperature shocks.

2. Keep it clean.

During the fermentation stage, you may want to open the fermentation container to retrieve a sample for a density reading, or perhaps just for a taste. In doing so be sure to sanitize your equipment (a sampling container or spoon) and to only allow it to contact the fermenting beer when necessary. It’s best to retrieve a larger sample than necessary just once than to open the fermentation container multiple times. Another instance when infection may occur is during transferring – some recipes work best with a transfer of the beer off of its yeast sediment into a new fermentation vessel, after primary fermentation of around 3-5 days. Again, be sure at all materials coming into contact with the beer are sanitized, preferably with a no-rinse sanitizer such as Star San.

3. Avoid air contact as much as possible.

Once your wort has become beer, oxygen becomes the enemy. Luckily oxygen bound to carbon in the form of carbon dioxide does not negatively oxidize the beer, and even pleasantly carbonates it. When accessing the beer for retrieving samples, transferring the beer to a new vessel, or bottling the beer, avoid excessive splashing or sloshing of the liquid, since this will push ambient oxygen into the solution. Just be deliberate and quick with your beer contact and be sure to seal everything when finished.

After approximately three weeks, your beer will reach the optimal state for consumption. If you’re having a get together, feel free to open the fermentation bucket and fill glasses straight from the vessel (a la English cask beer). After opening the fermenter, if you’re not able to finish all your brew within a day or so, bottling becomes the next best option to preserve your beer.

Jeffrey Michael, known as The Biking Brewer, is Certified with the Beer Judge Certification Program, having judged over twenty homebrew competitions over the past ten years. Also a trained sommelier and student of the French Culinary Institute, he frequently travels to uncommon parts of the globe in search of new fermented beverages. He tweets at @TheBikingBrewer and posts at http://ift.tt/1N7YoKt.

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