Wednesday 13 May 2009

Almond milk kefir

Today's kitchen science experiment (and I do lots of these - regular visitors are getting very wary of peering into jars and bowls in my house ;0) ) is almond milk kefir. Normally my kids eat lots of yogurt and take a probiotic to keep them stocked up with good bacteria. Now that my son is off dairy for the time being (at least) I needed to find new sources. Lucky for me he likes sauerkraut, but he isn't going to love it if I feed it to him every day!
I have been making milk kefir for a while and I did know that the grains could be used to make other kefir drinks. But it didn't occur to me to make some for boy#1 until I read this. I'm trying out almond milk kefir first because I think it sounds tasty. If he doesn't like it then I'll use it to make pancakes and try fruit juice kefir. Let's just hope the poor child doesn't mind being experimented on...!

Instructions are the same as for milk kefir - put the liquid to be 'kefired' in a clean jar with the grains, leave for 24 hours, strain out grains and drink. The only big difference is that the grains won't grow in non-dairy milk and will eventually die. So you need to keep some growing in dairy milk to replace them or this will quickly become very expensive!

3 comments:

Sara M. said...

Hi,

I'm wondering what kind of almond milk you used? Did you use sweetened or unsweetened? Thanks!

Unknown said...

How did this work out for you? I just made my first almond milk kefir this week and its pretty bland and thin. I was thinking it would be thicker like the real milk kefir.

I'd love to hear how it went! Thanks!

angelamarieliskey@hotmail.com

Ruth said...

I used unsweetened home-made almond milk. Never seen commercial stuff for sale around here.
It wasn't a big hit! I thought it tasted ok, but uninspiring. Kids thought it was horrible! The apple juice kefir was much more popular with the kids.