CheeseForum.org » Forum

I've been following David Asher's Art of Natural cheesemaking pretty successfully until now; however, I've run into a problem.

It seems my kefir grains just don't contain Geotrichum candidum. My cheese doesn't form the white rind, and even kefir, left out for a week, should be producing the white Geotrichum on it's surface like these pictures.

(https://www.milkwood.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/mason-jar-marcellin-691-1024x767.jpg)
(https://www.milkwood.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/mason-jar-marcellin-692-1024x768.jpg)

So, my question is, does your kefir contain Geotrichum? Is a Geotrichum-containing kefir just a hit and miss?

I live in Canada, where selling raw milk is illegal, so I can't source Geotrichum that way.
Is it possible to innoculate your kefir grains with Geotrichum? Can I just buy a packet of Geotrichum, and add it to my grains, and hope that my grains will "accept and incorporate" Geotrichum into its regular culture, and "carry it forward"?

Please let me know. Thanks!

If you are going to go to the trouble of buying Geo and adding it to your kefir why not just add it to your cheese instead. It takes a tiny pinch in the cheese pot to inoculte the cheese.

I don't know the answer to your question.  I'm dubious that you can do it that way.  Kefir is a balanced symbotic culture and I suspect that once it reaches a balance it probably doesn't change very much.  However, I have heard that you *can* create water kefir from milk kefir (but not the other way around), so maybe I'm wrong.  Nobody even knows how to generate kefir grains from nothing, as far as I know.  It's one of those miracle things that popped up once and I don't think it ever popped up again independently.  I've always wanted to do more research with it, but I've never gotten around to it.

So, having said that, I'm with RBF.  I'll say that using kefir as a "natural" way to start cheese is kind of dubious in my mind anyway.  It's not any more or less "natural" than using freeze dried cultures, I think.  It's just a stable set of cultures.  If you're adding it manually, then I don't think it's any more natural than adding any other cultures manually.  Cells are cells.  That's just my opinion.  I mean, there is definitely nothing wrong with doing it -- don't get me wrong!  It seems super fun to me.  I just don't think there's any meaning to avoiding other methods.

Welcome to the forum!

Through the years there have been many reports of various experiments using kefir, either alone or as an adjunct, for cheesemaking. Some seem to find good results, others seem to experience more frustration. I wonder if kefir can vary from location to location, batch to batch, person to person - ?

Geotrichium often occurs naturally in the environment; if you ever get a white mold growing on store bought cheese, there it is. As to whether it would grow into a kefir colony ... like Mike and RBF, I have no idea. I'd say that RBF's idea is most like to produce success.

But of course, none of us knows for sure what you will experience, especially with what seems to be such an unpredictable starter, so I hereby nominate you to do some experiments and report back to us.