I've got Kefir!

Milk Kefir Grain

I have read all about the health benefits of kefir and I was sooo ready to make my own. In a nutshell it's like a ramped-up version of yogurt. While yogurt has a few strands of beneficial bacteria, kefir has upwards of 30 strands. Also, it's easier to make because it ferments at room temperature while yogurt requires some sort of heat incubation. If you want more info about kefir, check out Cultures for Health's Kefir FAQ page.

I couldn't wait to get started so I called our local health food store to ask if they carried kefir grains (little globs of cultured bacteria and yeast that look little mini cauliflowers needed to turn milk into kefir) but alas... they did not. I live in Prince Edward Island and it can be difficult to get specialty items here.

After some snooping around, I found a lady who had extra culture of her own and was willing to sell some. I was so excited. She lives on a farm in the country so my husband (Mr. J) and I waited for a nice sunny day (it's winter here) to pack up the baby and take a drive out to the country.

We had the usual PEI instructions, which include things like "look for such and such landmark, turn left, drive for X amount of minutes" and ending with "we are the second farm on the left".

The driveway was very long and climbed uphill and we noticed a ravine of flowing water on either side of the long drop if one were to go too far on either side of the driveway. As we carefully drove on, we realized how icy it was. Now, there's normal icy and then there's this driveway... it was like driving on a pond, only up hill. We started to feel panicked... okay, I started to feel panicked, Mr. J started grumbling - what was so important about this frigin' kefir crap that we had to be navigating this death trap?

When we got to the house, we carefully worked on turning the car around. We slid and slipped and I was actually getting scared. I was no longer thinking about the grains, but we had come this far, so I wasn't going to leave without them. The lady was really nice to me and she was quite apologetic about the driveway. It seams she hadn't known it was that bad. She brought me inside to her farm house that was more than a century old. It was pretty neat to see, as I like that sort of thing.

By the time I had gotten back to Mr. J and baby A, I found out that the car had been slowly sliding while parked! There was no water or drop off at the top of the driveway so no immediate danger, but it was unsettling nevertheless. Mr. J was in a big hurry to get out of there. So I held my little dish of grains and said a prayer for our safety as we descended the long driveway. As we got closer to the water and the steep drop off, no one said a word. He was concentrating on keeping the car straight as an arrow and I was holding my breath. Finally we made it to the main road - what a relief!

When we arrived home from out little, ehem... adventure, I looked at my little kefir grains and thought, "boy you all were an awful lot of trouble." I put them in a glass jar and covered them with milk. I topped the jar with a coffee filter held on with an elastic band so the kefir could breathe.

I sure hope our family enjoys the kefir and gets plenty of health benefits from it. I know it will be a long while before I can talk my husband into "a little drive to the country to pick something up".