Two days of talking, teaching and selling starters and some cloths and Precious Prills. I had a great time teaching folks about getting healthier with fermented foods. Hello, to all who talked to me and actually looked up my blogspot. It was so nice to meet all of you. I'd say 2/3 of the people I talked to knew something about fermenting and and half of those were doing kefir or yogurt at home. The other 3rd had never heard of fermented foods before so it was great fun for me to teach about it.
I have learned that beginning fermenters will do best with one fermented food at a time andt first one I reccomend is milk kefir. Milk kefirs are pretty hard to kill off, and they do a good ferment of any milk within a short time....like 18 to 24 hrs. They also are very tolerant of the natural lactobacillus in raw milks. With yogurts you have to heat raw milk up to kill the lactobacillus because the yogurt strains of bacterial do not like the competition for lactose ( I guess that is the reason) anyway, it's hard to make yogurt with raw milk. I've heard of a strain of yogurt that will tolerate the lactobacillus but haven't picked up a start yet. I have 2 different kinds of milk kefir starts, one for raw milk and one for pasteurized milk. They are a little different but both work very well in turning milk into kefir.
Kefir just tastes good too especially if you blend it in a smoothie with some fruit and juice and just a little stevia for those in the family that like it sweeter. Another thing you can do with kefir or yogurt is separate cultured milks using a cloth like the one I demonstrated at the Expo, into whey and soft cheese. The cheese can be scraped off the flat polyester cloth I sell and stored in a container in the fridge and flavored either with fruit jam/preserves or flavored with garlic and herbs for a dip. The whey can be used to ferment other foods especially canned foods like beans and salsa and fruit juice. Heat canning kills natural lactobacillus and other bad mircroes as well, but the food is basicly dead. It has some nutrient value of course, but with some pre-planning you can open that food and introduce some whey with living lactobacillus and give it a couple, three days of fermenting and you can boost the nutrition and add flavor with the lactic acid the microbes make.
Kefir is just so versitile and so "gut friendly" as a pro-biotic food and so easy to make that is really is the best choice for a beginning fermentor.
Second choice after you get the hang of kefir, is sauerkraut or some other fermented vegetable "pickle".
Check out my older posts for these recipes and processes.
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