From Kefir to Cheese and Fermented Vegie

I had been making milk kefir for nearly 5 years and water kefir recently. The only converts from my badge of kefir are my parents and my sisters, besides that, not many people I know want to venture into kefir making even with its huge list of benefits. I was quite pleasantly surprised when a raw food group I join on facebook started discussing Kefir making and quite a lot of people are interested. Even I became very interested again with the benefits of kefir besides just making the drinks and so I ventured into making kefir cheese and fermented vegetables.

How to Make Kefir Cheese

I like to do things the easy way, so I use a drip coffee filter I got from Daiso. The drip cup is RM5 and the packet of filters are RM5 too. The coffee filter is not big, so maybe I could only pour in 1 cup of Strained Milk Kefir.

Kefir goodness

Cover and keep in the fridge for 24-36 hours and check the cheese.

This is how the whey will drip out of the cup. The whey is clear in colour.

The next evening, I took out the kefir cheese from the coffee filter and it was dry like cream cheese, maybe not like cheddar.

Kefir goodness

I tried the cheese with crackers, it was really good, but the cheese will still taste like kefir mind you. It can be flavoured with herbs, garlic etc. If you have any ideas, let me know, I haven’t tried flavouring it. This homemade cheese lasts 2 weeks in the fridge, but can be aged longer if kept in Extra Virgin Olive Oil.

How to ferment vegetables with Kefir Whey

So the water that dripped out of the filter, don’t throw them away coz they are really useful. It can me drank or used as a starter to ferment vegetables. MY mum ferments vegie a lot but I had never learned out, she makes pickles, acar, kimchi etc. I decided to try my take on it.

Kefir goodness

You will need a glass jar and any vegetables you like, eg beetroot, carrots, cucumber, tomatoes, garlic.

So I cut up some carrots and filled my nescafe jar to a quarter, cover it with water. Then pour in the rest of the whey until leaving around 2 inch at the top. This is for when the fermentation starts, the whole thing needs space to expand. I also added 2 tablespoons of seasalt. Fermentation of vegetables take from 5-10 days, some leave it longer. I’m going to try 5 days. The whey can be reused again to ferment more things.

Leave a reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Floating Social Media Icons by Acurax Wordpress Designers