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Did you know that commercial yogurt and kefir have little to no health benefit from a probiotic point of view?
The reason is that commercial yogurt and kefir are fermented for very short periods of time.  The length of time is so short (one person in the dairy industry told me that it is frequently only an hour or less) that thickening agents are sometimes added to artificially provide the look and feel of yogurt and kefir that has been properly fermented like would happen if you made it in your own kitchen.
The woeful inadequacy of commercially fermented dairy is why Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride MD, author of Gut and Psychology Syndrome, recommends eating yogurt or kefir that you’ve made yourself and fermented for a full 24 hours in order for the majority of the lactose (milk sugar) to be used up and sufficient strength of the probiotic cultures to become established.
Make Your Own Yogurt or Kefir
It is very important to learn how to make your own yogurt or kefir if you wish to enjoy the many health benefits that Traditional Cultures who relied on fermented dairy products experienced. Â Making yogurt or kefir yourself has the added bonus of allowing the selection of high quality, grassfed milk and avoidance of the additives and sugar frequently included with most commercially fermented dairy.
Commercially fermented dairy is just not going to cut it!
As a result, my sponsor Pleasant Hill Grain and I have joined forces to bring you this fun Real Food Challenge which will hopefully encourage you to take the important step of learning how to ferment dairy yourself in your own kitchen!
* If you have no idea how to make kefir or yogurt, no worries. Â A video how-to is provided for kefir at the end of this post along with a link to a written post describing the steps to make yogurt.
Note that you can also make yogurt and kefir in a slow cooker (see link for recipe and video how-to).
Allergic to dairy? Â You can still enter! Â Just use coconut milk instead (video how-to at end of post).
Even if making fermented dairy is a regular part of your routine or you’ve made it before but have gotten out of the habit, you are still eligible to enter to win!
The Prizes
From now until December 21 at midnight, every time you make your own yogurt or kefir (you can also switch between the two if you like), you will get an entry to win a Bosch Universal Mixer with Meat Grinder attachment– a $565 combined value!
The new Bosch Universal Plus Mixer is truly the ultimate stand mixer chosen by the most discerning cooks.  It is not only the strongest mixer in its class, it is also the most durable with an incredible lifespan of 17 years on average. This durability permits heavy duty mixing jobs to be performed with no risk to the motor –  up to 15 pounds of heavy dough can be mixed and kneaded at one time which is the equivalent of 8 loaves of bread in a single batch.
As if the Bosch Universal Plus Mixer plus Meat Grinder isn’t enough, there will be a second place prize too, a sleek, black Kuhn Rikon Vase Grinder for all your sea salt, pepper and herbal grinding needs!
It’s easy! Just login with either Facebook or your email address and fill in the entry box each time you make a batch of homemade yogurt or kefir.
Don’t forget that each and every time you make a batch of yogurt or kefir before December 21 at midnight, you can come back to this post and submit another entry to Rafflecopter to increase your chances of winning!
Getting Your First Batch Started
A video how-to is provided below for both milk based kefir and coconut milk kefir. Â You can easily get a batch of kefir started in less than 5 minutes.
If yogurt is your thing, click here for my written blog on how to make raw yogurt using your microwave (turned off of course) as the incubator! And, if you’re wondering about Greek yogurt vs regular yogurt and which to make, you can check out the linked article first to help you decide.
Good luck and have fun!
We are heading out of town in a week, and I had planned to do a batch of Kefir every day so we could take some with us-PERFECT TIMING 🙂 (I only have enough grains for 1 qt at a time right now…) We love our kefir smoothies every morning 🙂 It’s the ‘reward’ I give my kids (and myself) for taking their fermented cod liver oil 🙂
I am very passionate about homemade yogurt. Go to Mother Linda’s site for a great Bulgarian yogurt made with either raw milk or whole, non-homogenized, pastuerized milk. She also wrote some articles for WAPF on yogurt and mentions an author who claims in one of his books that yogurt has very high antibacterial/antiviral properties for only the first two weeks after it’s made, so recommends not making huge batches to sit around for weeks or months in your fridge, but to make it weekly, or every other week. I did this last year and my hubby and I were never sick, not even a sniffle. We eat it or make smoothies out of our homemade every day and believe that that plus our FCLO are what helped keep us so healthy last year, and so far this. I make 1-2 quarts weekly so guess I should enter this contest!
Batch complete: Kefir
Batch complete: Kombucha
😀
My girls and I eat smoothies with raw kefir daily! ( kefir, yolks, coconut oil, bee pollen, frozen strawberries & bananas, vanilla, Celtic salt, and cocoa powder) We make two 1/2 gal. batches of kefir about twice a week. It is so easy! Perhaps we should branch out into yogurt as well!
Made some kefir!
New batch of yogurt today! I make about 8 cups per week using the crock pot method. Family loves it! Also, we use it with herbs & spices to make homemade ranch dressing/dip.
Just made some raw milk yogurt & shared with my mom! I make kefir every day and just started pronouncing it correctly 🙂
I made kefir and learned to make creme fraiche from the GAPS book. i just found another thrift store yogurt maker and gave it to a friend so she would start making her own as well. Love those jars on the counter with fresh raw milk fermenting into even better stuff.
Making yogurt this morning from raw milk! Not only do I eat it but my dog loves it too. 🙂
I love making villi yogurt, no fussy incubating, just on the counter for a day. I was making kefir until I read that if you have trouble with candida you shouldn’t use homemade kefir due to the proliferation of wild yeasts.