Making Kefir

Admittedly, it took me a few attempts to make a kefir batch. Part of the problem was that I wasn’t sure what a finished batch should really be like. I also get the feeling that many authors dabble in making kefir, but really stick to yogurt, which left me a little confused. These books included:

• Better Than Store-Bought by Helen Witty and Elizabeth Schneider Colchie, 1979
• Fresh Food from Small Spaces by RJ Ruppenthal, 2008
• Nourishing Traditions by Sallon Fallon with Mary G. Enig, Ph.D., 2001
• Truly Cultured by Nancy Lee Bentley, 2007
• Wild Fermentation by Sandor Ellix Katz, 2002
• Packaging from kefir starter from New England Cheese Supply

First off, what kind of milk?

• BTSB: whole or skim, though “whole milk makes a smoother product.”
• FFSS: none specified, but if using a milk alternative like soy milk, add a little extra sugar
• NT: whole nonhomogenized milk with optional extra cream
• TC: whole milk and a little extra cream.
• WF: none specified
• Packaging: non specified

Mind you, some of these books are dietary books, so having nonhomogenized milk original fat content fits into the NT’s agenda, but I’m not sure if this is essential or not.

Two sources recommended only filling the non-metal container ¾ of the way full, as the kefir will foam a little bit when fermenting.

The milk should be heated to room temperature or slightly warmer (the packaging suggested 86⁰ while others thought 65-76⁰ was fine) before adding the kefir grains, which some suggested may need to be rinsed with milk. All authors agreed that it should be left a room temperature, though Ruppenthal was the only one to strongly advise against using a yogurt maker or keeping it warmer than room temperature, while New England Cheesemaking Making Supply Company thought it was okay. Ruppenthal was also the only one who believed that light was bad for kefir fermentation, suggesting the process be done in a cupboard.

So far, mostly good, but how long? Everyone agrees that it is done when you think it is sour enough, but nobody really agrees even a little bit about how long that might be:

• BTSB: 8-24 hours, though they appeared to be using an imitation culture rather than kefir grains.
• FFSS: 24-48 hours. He also mentions shaking it to increae the alcohol slightly, but I was not sure if he was referring to milk based kefir or more of a soda pop style kefir.
• NT: wrote 12 hours to 2 days, but usually happens within 24 hours if using powder. She indicates that it only needs to be stirred if grains are used to redistribute them.
• TC: suggests “12 hours to 2 days, stirring 2-3 times during the process.”
• WF: 24-48 hours, agitating the jar periodically to remix the milk as it separates.
• Packaging: 12 hours until thickened

WF was the only one that warns about separation, which I actually think is due to the cream I added to the milk. I’m not sure if whole milk that is homogenized would do that.

Everyone agreed that I had to strain the kefir to separate out the grains once I deemed the kefir done. The kefir would then store a few weeks in the refrigerator to be consumed. To be honest, my finished kefir was pretty thick, but could be squeezed though a cheesecloth. I never found any kefir grains. Makes me wonder about my starter culture, like, is it really kefir, or just another culture being passed off as kefir?

If I had of found grains, I could have taken them and:

• FFSS: keep them in a covered cup of milk in the refrigerator and to refresh the milk every couple of days. This would give them a storage life of two weeks before they have to be used to make a new batch to keep them in good condition.
• TC: disagrees, believing that can be rinsed and then placed in a small jar with ½ cup of filtered water. She says they will store there for a few weeks, or in the freezer for a few months. “If they are left too long in storage, they will lose their culturing power.”

Got it figured out? I’m guessing that honestly, it isn’t that hard to make kefir, and it isn’t hard to mess it up. None of my batches really turned out like I thought they should, but something definitely happened. Honestly, I just wasn’t trusting myself, so they were probably okay.

One other thing to note is that kefir can be used to make non-dairy based products, but everything I read on the topic did suggest that special non-dairy kefir grains should be used instead.

Additional kefir recipes and ideas:

• Wild Fermentation talks about making kefir with coconut milk. He also mentions using fruit or vegetable juice, sweet water, rice milk, soy milk, or nut milk. He writes, “Cranberry juice dyed the grains red, and Gatorade (!) left a neon blue stain. Whatever the medium, the grains seem to transform it, though they do not rapidly multiply as they do in milk. The process is exactly the same as kefiring millk…” He then included a recipe for pepita seed milk and kefir.
• In the book Better than Store Bought by Helen Witty and Elizabeth Schneider Colchie, they brefly discuss making kefir, and provide two flavored recipes. One is adding 2 tablespoons honey and ½ teaspoon vanilla extract before chilling. The other is to puree a 10 oz package of frozen strawberries to a quart of kefir.
• Making cider using kefir grains and cider yeast
• I have also seen kefir cheese in the grocery store, which Ruppental says is made with very mature, less runny kefir that has been strained like making yogurt cheese, giving it 24-48 hours to drip. The whey from kefir cheese, he adds, “could be used to culture a batch of kimchi or sourdough starter.”

Kefir

Kefir “grains” are little bundles of bacteria and lactose-fermented yeast, and can cause things to ferment. Usually, when somebody says “kefir,” they are referring to a milk based drink that has been fermented with kefir grains. Kefir was originally from Turkey, and it is possible to find it in grocery stores today, though most books claim this is cultured milk passed off as kefir, and was not actually fermented with kefir grains.

According to RJ Ruppenthal in his book Fresh Food from Small Spaces, kefir has “stronger healthful properties” than yogurt, and he also claims that the word kefir translates to English from Turkish as “feel good.” He also goes on to explain that the kefir grains can be used in addition to culturing milk on vegetables, fruit juice, and sugar water. “Remarkably,” he writes, “the very same grains also can culture and create just about any fermented food, including a delicious sourdough bread, ginger beer, sauerkraut, or kimchi.”

I find kefir to taste a lot like yogurt, and I have a hard time drinking it plain and unsweetened. Maybe it is an acquired taste. I have found that it works quite well to substitute it in recipes for plain yogurt, especially if you are doing a marinade or need a thinner sauce.

Further reading to the nutrition of kefir:

• Probiotic Foods for Good Health by Beatrice Trum Hunter, 2008

Books on Labneh

Better Than Store-Bought by Helen Witty and Elizabeth Schneider Colchie, 1979

I mentioned last week that this book has a recipe for “laban.” Theirs calls for homemade yogurt which is strained though cheesecloth for an hour, and then allowed to drip for another 8-12 hours. The final product is then lightly salted and stirred. They also suggest adding herbs, and serving chilled with pita bread, pumpernickel, or other bread and crackers.

Wild Fermentation by Sandor Ellix Katz, 2002

Last week, I mentioned this book talks about making “labneh” or yogurt cheese, though the sections on yogurt, kishk (yogurt with bulgur wheat) , and kefir are longer and more interesting.

The YoChee Way by Nikki & David Goldbeck, 2001

Strangely, the words for “labneh” this book gave, I could not google out a single one to initially figure out that this was a book about cooking with strained yogurt. So, they decided to term it YoChee, which nobody else calls it, and since then the “Greek Yogurt” craze has hit. Anyway, they spend a little bit of time talking about the nutritional value of YoChee, and claim it is a zero-fat, calcium-rich, low-calorie, high-protein food that can be used to substitute high-fat foods such as butter, margarine, cream cheese, sour cream, and mayonnaise. Admittedly, these chapters sound like an infomercial, yet I am curious. The rest of the book is 275 recipes for cooking with YoChee. Each recipe includes the nutritional content of the recipe. It is an intriguing cookbook.

 

Cheesemaking books that include yogurt and yogurt cheese:

• 101 Recipes for Making Cheese, including simple homemade yogurt, Bulgarian-style yogurt made with a different culture and strained, and quick cooked yogurt.
• Homemade Cheese by Janet Hurst. She includes yogurt, lebneh, and kefir.
• The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Cheese Making by James R. Leverentz. He talks about yogurt, yogurt cream cheese, and yogut dessert cheese with honey and spices.

Additional nutritional and/or alternative diet books which have a few pages regarding making and consuming yogurt (similar to Wild Fermentation):

• Truly Cultured by Nancy Lee Bentley, 2007

Making Labneh

The YoChee Way by Nikki & David Goldbeck basically skims over how to make yogurt, leaving it to the instructions of the yogurt maker unit, going directly to converting yogurt to labneh, which is being marketed today as Greek Yogurt. I decided, well, why can’t I buy yogurt and make the conversion? So, I picked up the cheapest plain yogurt I could find at the store, paying $1.90 for the quart, and proceeded to drain it. Pretty much nothing happened. I looked at the ingredients then: gelatin. They artificially thickened the yogurt with gelatin and corn starch, which stopped me from making labneh. I’m sure this process can be done with store bought yogurt, but I just didn’t get the right one.

So I made up a batch of yogurt, and then got out my cheese making supplies. I put the yogurt in a cheese cloth, tied it to a long spoon, and suspended it over a large pot. I put the pot in the refrigerator and let it drain overnight, which was probably 11 hours.

It produced quite a bit of whey, and the amount of yogurt cheese that I had was about half the amount of yogurt I started with, as it seemed to compact a bit with the whey gone.

I tasted it. It was still tart, but it didn’t seem to be as tart as it was when it was yogurt. It is also really smooth and kind of like cream cheese. I could see how it would make a nice spread replacement, especially if it is a “zero-fat, calcium-rich, low-calorie, high-protein food.” I tried it out on an English muffin. It’s good replacing cream cheese, but a bit tangy for my taste and I needed jam. Not sure I could do it as a mayo replacement, but I know people who could.

Pretty simple to make, and cheap, too!

I will add that John W Fischer included in his book Cheese: Identification, Classification, Utilization a recipe for an herb-marinated yogurt cheese as an appetizer, which was actually copied verbatim.

Lebneh aka Greek Yogurt

While researching yogurt, I would come across “yogurt cheese” every once in a while.  At first, I thought it was a gimmick or something, as it was strained yogurt. Then my parents brought over a container of strained Greek yogurt they got from Costco, and the texture was so much thicker than yogurt. Then I knew: this is yogurt cheese.

The interesting thing about yogurt cheese is that nobody agrees on the name. “Yogurt cheese” is the most common, though I’ve also seen laban, labna, lebaneh, laben, and labneh, with the last one being the only spelling to trigger a Wikipedia entry under “strained yogurt.” The reason behind this is because it is a common Middle East and Eastern Mediterranean food, so different languages create different names, including labni, lebni, and even dahi in India and Pakistan and chaka in Afghanistan and Tajikistan. One American cookbook solely devoted to cooking with this product decided to abandon the traditional names and call it YoChee, which nobody else but them uses.

Back to the strained Greek yogurt my parents brought over: I told them how to make it. Both parents asked why it was Greek, to which I gave a smart ass response of “marketing.” Reading the Wikipedia entry for strained yogurt, I was right. Considering how many countries eat this stuff, Greece would actually be on the fringe of consuming it. The article actually says that most yogurt in Greece is not strained, but due to current political relations, calling it by another country or just “strained yogurt” probably would not sell as well.

In The YoChee Way by Nikki & David Goldbeck, which was written in 2001 before the current “Greek Yogurt” fad, claims that strained yogurt is a claim it is a zero-fat, calcium-rich, low-calorie, high-protein food that can be used to substitute high-fat foods such as butter, margarine, cream cheese, sour cream, and mayonnaise. Supposedly, it does not curdle at high temperatures.

Further Reading:

• YoChee Frequently Asked Questions

2011 Washington Brewer’s Fest

This year was the first time we made it to the Washington Brewer’s Festival held in the Seattle area. We went early on Saturday, which was kind of rainy and didn’t have a lot of cover. They had a lot of beer, but the cider and wine tent including Sky River Mead was the only tent smart enough to move their tables back, giving people some shelter.

My husband started to say, “If I had a blog, I would…” I don’t know what he said after that, but I told him he should guest blog on the topic for me today, partly because I’m not really a beer drinker, yet I’m reviewing a beer fest, so why not actually have a snobbish beer drinker write about it instead? Here is his review:

Although we live in Washington, we’re much more familiar with the Oregon beer scene. This was the first large Washington beer fest we’ve actually been to.

The Space: The festival grounds were large and spacious- there was much more room than at the Oregon Brewer’s Festival, which is probably the best comparison. As a result, the tents were more spread out, and when it gets busy in the evening, I still think you’ll have room to breathe.  Most beer festivals I’ve been to fill up in the evening and it’s a wall to wall crush of people- that’s one of reasons I always go early.

Glassware: Another thing that this festival did well was the tasting glasses. Instead of getting the ubiquitous octagonal plastic mug, (I probably have 20 of those by now) we got a 4 ounce plastic weizen style glass. This enabled the pourers to not spend so much time filling to a certain line, but instead right up to the brim. If you wanted a larger glass for full pours, you could get one for $5, which came with a couple of extra tasters.  In my opinion, Beer Fests are about trying as many new, different beers as you can- if you want to down pints, go to a bar.

Meet the Brewers: Another really neat thing about this festival was that many of the brewers (or at least brewery staff) were on hand pouring their beers.  If you had a question about a beer, you could probably get a decent answer.

Variety: Also, each brewery had several beers pouring, which led to an extremely wide variety of beers being poured.  There was a massive amount of beer styles represented at this fest.  In the course of 12 tokens, I tried a CDA, several wits, some Belgians, a couple of porters, an Irish red, and a couple of lagers.  Allowing breweries to bring several (most had 2-4 taps) beers made this a much more diverse fest.  The only thing they didn’t have in abundance was sours- not surprising since Washington doesn’t have a single brewery focused on sours. (If I’m wrong please tell me in the comments- road trip!)

Winners of the beer fest:

• Foggy Noggin’s Bit O Beaver: A true English style bitter- I could drink this all day at 3.4%. When my homebrewing skills improve some, I will be attempting a clone.
• Chuckanut Brewery’s Vienna Lager:  Chuckanut produces some really excellent clean beers, and the Vienna Lager did not disappoint.  It was clean, malty, and easy to drink.
• Cinco Plano: This was near the end of the fest, and I didn’t take many notes on it.  Apparently it was supposed to be a Mexican Lager/Saison hybrid.  An odd beer, but very drinkable.  It was slightly tart, and had some funky brett notes. I’m guessing they used Brett C or L and didn’t let it ferment all the way- it tasted funky, but not over the top barnyard notes that you get with Brett that has been fermenting a long time. A unique beer worthy of mention and praise.

The Bad:

• The Weather:  News Flash- it rains in Washington.  The rain wasn’t that bad however, and it did keep the crowds down.
• The Buzz Tent: It was a small, standalone tent that was not marked on the map or with a sign. Literally it was a guy, standing in a field in front of two taps. I walked up and asked him what the tent was. They need better signs, and an “upcoming tap list” would be helpful as well. To their credit, it appeared they planned on switching out kegs every few hours instead of when the kegs died. That would give patient fans a better chance to try more beers. Posting a list online would be nice to, so that I can remember what it was I tried.
• No Sours: A personal gripe, but since I know some breweries produce them, or are in the process (Naked City, Black Raven to name two) I would like to see some sours in the future.
• Logistics: The logistics of this festival were interesting- because of limited parking, you had to park far away and then take a free shuttle bus in. This wasn’t a big issue, because we got there early and left early, we didn’t have to wait for a shuttle bus. I could see this being a bigger problem later in the day.
• Cha-Ching! There’s way to say this nicely, so….  The WABL appear to be a bunch of money-grubbing bastards.  $25 buys you admission, a small plastic tasting glass, and 6 tokens. Extra tokens are $1.50 each, and admission is only good for one day. We spent 60 dollars for the two of us, and if the weather was nicer, we might have stayed and spent more money than that.  Contrast this to the Oregon Brewer’s Fest: Admission is a $6 mug, and tokens are a buck a piece. So for the same $25, that’s would be 13 more tasting tokens. I don’t know if the costs are so high because of the venues WABL chooses and the shuttles, but it’s a serious turn off, especially when money is tight. [This is probably the most expensive festival we have attended.]

All in all: Even with the steep pricing, the extra space, having brewers on hand to pour, and variety of beers make this a festival worth returning to. Although I love the Portland Beer scene, at the end of the day, this is one of the best beer fests I’ve attended.

Burtle Beer, brewing beer at the speed of a turtle signing off.

Books on Yogurt

As I mentioned yesterday, most of the yogurt books I checked out from the library only had one to four recipes on making yogurt, and the rest of the book was dedicated to cooking with yogurt. Here is a review of the books I saw:

Better Than Store-Bought by Helen Witty and Elizabeth Schneider Colchie, 1979

When it comes specifically to yogurt, there is a paragraph on it being cheaper to make than buying it, followed by a decent recipe and a vanilla yogurt and fruit-flavored yogurt. The chapter about dairy products also includes making ricotta, cottage cheese, cream cheese, butter, sour cream (similar to yogurt in process), frozen yogurt, laban, kefir, and ice cream.

Creative Yogurt Cooking by Ethel Lang Graham, 1978

Graham has a nice introduction to her book, including a history, how yogurt it made commercially, economics and how to make yogurt at home, nutrition of yogurt, and uses. She even suggests in this section a few ways of keeping jars of yogurt mixture at 110⁰, such as a food warming tray, outside on a hot day, on an electric pad, in a gas oven with the pilot light on, in a slightly warm electric oven, or covered and placed near a radiator.

Beyond the basic recipe, Graham’s book has the most yogurt making recipes I have seen in any book. This includes low-calorie plan skim-milk yogurt, creamy plain skim-milk yogurt, thickened plain yogurt, rich plain whole-milk yogurt, yogurt cottage cheese, vanilla yogurt, coffee yogurt, fruit-flavored yogurts (made from fresh fruit, canned fruit, preserves, syrups, extracts, or drink mixes), date-nut yogurt, and honey stir-up yogurt. After that, starting on page 15, are recipes using yogurt. There are some color pictures.

This has actually be been the most impressive book in regards to making yogurt, but remember it only does so in the first 15 pages.

Fresh Food from Small Spaces by RJ Ruppenthal, 2008

While I did a search for yogurt with my library, this book came up. I was admittedly curious, and I’m not judging it so harshly because this book focuses on so much more than yogurt, yet it does devote a chapter of 15 pages to making yogurt, kefir, and other fermented foods. Ruppenthal justifies the chapter, saying that it adds nutrition to food, and it can be done in minimal space.

Ruppenthal goes through the process of making yogurt, and suggests soy based yogurt have a little sugar added to help the yogurt culture get started since there is no lactose. Ruppenthal says if a yogurt is used to start the yogurt, purchase one with “active cultures,” avoid yogurts with pectin, and try to buy organic. The process of making yogurt is then provided.

Interestingly, Ruppenthal closes the chapter on yogurt, kefir, and other fermentations by highly recommending Wild Fermentation.

Wild Fermentation by Sandor Ellix Katz, 2002

This book is technically not dedicated to yogurt, but it ended up being the book I felt most comfortable with making my first batch of yogurt. In addition, there is a recipe for labneh (yogurt cheese), kishk (yogurt with bulgur wheat), and kefir. He also includes yogurt based sauces for raita from India and tsatsiki from Greece, a soup using kishk, and pancakes using kefir.

Yogurt by Sarina Jacobson, 2008

In the two page “All About Yogurt” introduction, Jacobson lists traditional Swiss-style yogurt, fruit-fruit-on-the-bottom, and frozen yogurt. She then goes on to talk about other yogurts of the world, such as ayran, doogh, kefir, lassi, and even American smoothies. So I was thinking, “Okay, we are going to learn how to make different kinds of yogurt!” Wrong. It included one recipe on how to make yogurt, and it doesn’t talk temperature and tells you to “transfer to a yogurt maker and follow the manufacturer’s instructions”. When an author tells me to follow machine instructions without giving me an indication of what should happen, I think they are lazy. What this book does have is “more than 70 delicious and healthy recipes” using yogurt, and includes a nice color picture of each recipe. Of all those international yogurts listed, it only has recipes for smoothies, and making a beverage out of yogurt that is like lassi. There is a small index by ingredient. This has been one of the least impressive books when it comes to yogurt.

Additional nutritional and/or alternative diet books which have a few pages regarding making and consuming yogurt:

• Fermented Foods and Beverages of the World, edited by Jyoti Prakash Tamang and Kasipathy Kailasapathy, 2010
• Nourishing Traditions by Sallon Fallon with Mary G. Enig, Ph.D., 2001
• Probiotic Foods for Good Health by Beatrice Trum Hunter, 2008
• Truly Cultured by Nancy Lee Bentley, 2007 (641.302)

Making Yogurt

When I started checking out yogurt books from the library, I was expecting something like an ice cream maker book with a hundred different recipes on how to make yogurt. I was sorely disappointed, as most yogurt books give you one to four recipes on how to make yogurt, and then about 50-100 recipes on cooking with yogurt. In the end, I turned to Wild Fermentation by Sandor Ellix Katz because he explained why certain things were being done.

One of the reasons I have never really attempted making yogurt before was because I really didn’t want to spend money trying to keep it insulated and warm for 8 hours, especially if I tried this once and never did it again. Katz also had a solution for this with items I already had on hand. So, I heated a little bit of water to 120⁰ F and poured it in an ice chest, high enough to cover most of the jar I was going to use. I overheated it because I knew the ice chest would cool it a touch, and figured by time I was going to put the yogurt mixture in it that it would have cooled a little more. In hind sight, I didn’t need to heat the water: my tap water comes out near 120⁰.

With a jar full of water, I measure the temp of the water in the ice chest for fermenting yogurt.

Next, I heated a quart of milk to nearly 180⁰. Originally, when I read this step in all the recipes, this made absolutely no sense to me because the next step is to cool the milk to 110⁰. The milk I bought was already pasteurized, so heating the milk was pointless to me. No so, according to Katz. Heating up the milk makes for thicker yogurt. I got to looking at another book, Better than Store-Bought: A Cookbook written in 1979 by Helen Witty and Elizabeth Schneider Colchie, and they stress, “Do not be tempted to leave out this step. It ensures a smooth, even curd.” Katz then suggested putting the pot into an ice bath, but I thought it would just be easier to go ahead and put the heated milk into my jar and put that in the ice bath. This cooling has been a bit tricky for me, as the temperature at the bottom of the jar is colder than the top, so I’ve overshot 110⁰ a few times with the top too hot and the bottom too cold.

Once I got the temperature down, I added only a tablespoon of yogurt which claimed to have live bacteria in it. Katz says that his older copy of The Joy of Cooking says that the lesser amount of yogurt “starter” actually gives the bacteria room to grow, which results in a less watery yogurt. I then placed the yogurt in the cooler. Up to this point, it had taken me 30 minutes to process.

As to what yogurt to use as a starter, it needs to contain live active cultures and should not have been pasteurized after the yogurt was made. In addition, the yogurt should not contain things like gelatin, which is used as a thickener.

The next morning, which was about 11 hours later, I checked to see if the yogurt had fermented to my satisfaction. First off, the water inside the cooler was 85⁰. The yogurt in the jar was firm and did not slosh around when I tipped the jar slightly. I opened it up and tasted it, and it was good. It still had a slightly sweet flavor, but then again, I’m not accustomed to eating yogurt that hasn’t been chilled. I declared it a success, and placed it in my refrigerator, where Katz says it will store for weeks.

Now, I’ve read different things regarding using another tablespoon of your homemade yogurt to start the next batch of yogurt. Some claim that your yogurt will start to pick up other bacteria from your home, so a fresh starter is necessary. Katz didn’t seem to have an issue with this, and my logical thinking tends to agree. I mean, we have only had controlled, single strand bacteria and yeast for maybe the last hundred years, since Louis Pastuer. Therefore, all yogurts made for the millenniums leading up to this discovery would have been wild, whatever bacteria was there, fermentation of milk. I think if I started having problems, then I would get a new starter, but otherwise, if I’m constantly buying yogurt to get that pure bacteria, then I might as well just be eating store bought yogurt because I’m buying it. However, for as easy as it is to make, it is really inexpensive to make. I’ve seen cheap $2 a quart yogurt full of fillers like gelatin, and for those same $2 I can buy a gallon of milk and use a culture repeatedly and get four quarts of yogurt without fillers and with very little effort.

Update: Now that I have a few batches of yogurt made, the other day I decided to be lazy and use the microwave to heat the milk to room temperature, but not warmer. I found out that not heating the milk up to 180⁰ makes the yogurt runnier and it does produce a little bit of curd rather than being smooth yogurt. So, my cheating did not pay off.

 

Yogurt

The opening lines of Yogurt by Sarina Jacobson reads, “Yogurt is the wine of the dairy world. Just as wine is made from fermented grapes, yogurt is produced by fermenting milk sugar, known as lactose, into lactic acid. The result is the internationally popular, creamy and smooth dairy product – yogurt.”

Yogurt is found all over the world and in many forms, and is thought to be very beneficial to eat. Ethel Lang Graham wrote in her book Creative Yogurt Cooking that in 1908 Russian Elie Metchnikoff  published:

“humans die prematurely from auto-intoxication. He believed that putrefactive bacteria growing in the intestinal tract and produces harmful toxins that are absorbed into the bloodstream and gradually poison the body. He came to this astonishing conclusion by observing the diets of Bulgarian peasants who were noted for their great longevity.

The Bulgarians consumed about 3 quarts of yogurt a day. He theorized that since putrefactive bacteria will not live in yogurt, the consumption of large quantities of yogurt will prevent auto-intoxication.

His interesting theory has never been proved correct. However, in the early 1900s it certainly did much to popularize yogurt.”

And thus, yogurt is now available in any American grocery store and marks the beginning of yogurt as health food marketing, including those commercials with Jamie Lee Curtis.

Interestingly, Mechnikoff also named one of the bacteria used to make yogurt Lactobacillus bulgaricus after the Bulgarians. This is usually paired with Streptococcus themophillus because the two of them “produce the most pleasing flavor and firmness without contributing an undesirable, excessively sour taste to yogurt,” said Graham. Other common bacteria may include L. acidophilus, S. thermophiles, L. bifidus, L. casei, L. reuteri, and/or L. rhamnosus.

In my next post, I’ll talk about how to ferment milk to make yogurt.

Further reading to the nutrition of yogurt:

• Probiotic Foods for Good Health by Beatrice Trum Hunter, 2008

Cider Summit and Fruit Beer Fest 2011

I made it to two festivals this last weekend that had never been held in Portland before.

On Saturday, I went to the Cider Summit in Portland, OR. Admittedly, my day was off to a rough start as the event was held at Elizabeth Caruthers Park in the Southwest Waterfront neighborhood. This is an area in which the city has been pumping a lot of money into for development, yet access to the neighborhood is tricky, indirect, and under construction. However, once I got there, I was given 8 tickets and 2 extra for being there early in the day, along with a small plastic cup. Most of the northwest cidermakers were there, along with a few national ones that were being poured by volunteers.

So very often, when we go to a beer tasting festival, the brewery made a specialty beer just for that event, so there is this mad scramble to try it. This was not the case at the Cider Summit, and when coupled with the fact that I had tried probably 75% of what was there, I was more relaxed that normal. I was able to try new ciders, revisit favorites, chat with producers, and make new friends with cider enthusiasts. I was not in a minority for once. It was a pretty good day.

The next day, we went to the Fruit Beer Festival at Burnside Brewing. Now Burnside Brewing is a new company, so I think this festival was a bit of promotion. However, the previous day the streets would have been a little messed up due to the Rose Festival Parade, which also may have given an extra boost in attendance. Rumor had it that they had run out of a lot of beers already. When we got there early on Sunday, half of the list they had provided was gone, and they had done a mad scramble and come up with some as replacements that were not on the list. There was other evidence of underestimations, such as the porta potties had not been cleaned overnight.

My husband was kind of excited going to this festival. For so long, fruit beers had gotten the reputation of being wheat beer with fruit that were girl drinks. Here was an event where an IPA had mangos or huckleberries, and IPAs are not all that popular with women. The event also had a lot of sour beers, and my husband loves the sour beers. Interestingly, there was only one or two beer there that were not locally made. My husband also noted that adding fruit to beers seemed to muddle the flavor up, meaning the beer was no longer crisp. Sometimes, that is okay, and sometimes it isn’t. Anyway, we think this event will be back next year, but we think it will have to find a park rather than Burnside Brewery as a venue.