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All of the time I've been up and at 'em this morning has been taken up with brewing my first cup of coffee, cooking a bowl of oatmeal, tasting my first concoction of water kefir to find out how the fermenting is going, and responding to some personal e-mails. Each of these activities take time. That's okay with me. I got plenty of nothing to do.
A couple of the e-mail posts I answered were about the art of making kefir. My first batch of water kefir has caused me to be unexpectedly nervous about doing it right. My angst is more than being somewhat of a perfectionist by nature. Rather, the doing of it seems so simple I feel like I must be leaving some step of the process out, and as a result, the whole deal will crash and burn.
As far as plants go I have a brown thumb. My clumsiness might cause my kefir mother culture to die. If that happens I'll feel like a fool again, and have to beg forgiveness for my incompetence. Granted, I don't rightly know who or what I'd have to beg to. Maybe my abject shame will force me to create some new god to pray to. That might become exciting.
As far as plants go I have a brown thumb. My clumsiness might cause my kefir mother culture to die. If that happens I'll feel like a fool again, and have to beg forgiveness for my incompetence. Granted, I don't rightly know who or what I'd have to beg to. Maybe my abject shame will force me to create some new god to pray to. That might become exciting.
The more I get experientially involved with making kefir the less I find to get picky about. I find myself thinking that making kefir can't possibly be this simple; this easy. The part of the process that is incomprehensible to me is the bacterial clumps called the mother culture. They look like pieces of cooked white cauliflower. In the English language these granules of bacteria are referred to as "grains". It is these grains that do all the work of fermentation.
The grains of the bacterial mother culture only engage in two basic activities. They eat sugar and reproduce baby grains. They're self-propagating. It's their babies and their excrement that seems to be of utmost importance to the kefir maker/consumer. The only effort they have to generate to create some kefir/manna, is put the grains and sugar together with some minerals in a jar of water or milk.
Even after I read it multiple times I wasn't grokking the fact that the concatenation of "ose" to "lac" describes the sugar found in milk. Lactose means milk sugar. It's like how "ose" is used in fructose or sucrose. "Ose" means sugar.
Both friendly and unfriendly gut bacteria eat sugar in order to survive and reproduce. Never in my life did I consider the fact that there is enough sugar in milk to ferment it. No external sugar required. Unindating the mother culture grains in milk results in the bacterial grains converting the lactose to lots of nutritional products, and obviates the sugar enough that diabetics can easily consume it.
Milk kefir is pre-digested milk. Lactose intolerant people can (within reason) drink all they like and not get sick. None of that means too much to me. As of now I'm not diabetic nor lactose intolerant. I do have somewhat the same problem many aging people have with digesting the food I eat. I don't have but a couple of molar teeth to chew and chew and chew. Pre-digested anything to any degree can be helpful.
What I'm after with the home-made kefir, both milk and water kefir, is the probiotics. I wanna have a gut full of friendly bacteria to balance out any unfriendly bacteria that make life miserable for me. If you remember I recently wrote a lot about probiotics and the research I was doing to find out what I needed to do to get them into my GI tract.
The internet research for information on probiotics, and the probiotic capsules, and commercial kefir I started drinking all led me to discovering that I could make my own kefir that has orders of magnitude more live probiotics than the store-bought stuff. For sure it's much cheaper. Better and cheaper get to me every time.
I'm expecting the milk kefir grains I ordered from Michigan to arrive sometime today. I bought the milk I'm gonna use. According to what the kefir pundits tell me it only takes half as long to make milk kefir as it does water kefir. The discussion list members write frequently about the various products that can be made starting with milk kefir.
The one product they mention that really interests me is sour cream. I'm fairly addicted to commercial sour cream mixed up with dried onion soup to make something akin to a party dip. I literally used it as a condiment for practically every food product I consume. I think I had some dietary problems with it because the commercial sour cream was pasteurized, and all the probiotics were killed before it appears on the shelf. To be able to make my own living sour cream that will make me immortal is a worthy, but impractical goal, but it might let me die happier.
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