We have a brand new cheese!
And it is Probiotic!!

     An artisanal farmstead raw milk Kefir cheese, handcrafted with authentic Kefir grains.

     We applied for a Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) producer grant in 2005 and received funding for our project in July of 2006. The plan was to upscale a home recipe to a commercial process for Kefir cheese using authentic living Kefir grains. In cooperation with the Cornell University Food Processing & Development Laboratory, we set out to establish a standard for the new Kefir cheese. We are very fortunate to have the expertise at Cornell to help put our new recipe together.

     Kefir grains are a mixture of living microbial lactic bacterium and yeasts. They have been used for centuries to culture milk by traditional peoples, promoting good health and longevity. Kefir grains propagate naturally when immersed in milk, making them an ideal sustainable natural resource. They have been nurtured and passed down for generations, and recently have become available in the U.S. They have never been applied to commercial cheese production. Although there are Kefir products on the market, they are not made with Kefir grains, and do not include the unique array of beneficial probiotic bacteria inherent in the Kefir grains. We have tested our cheese for probiotics, and have found a healthy amount of probiotic organisms in our aged Kefir cheese.

     If you are interested in using Kefir grains for home use, please visit our links page. There you will find "Dom's Kefir site" and you can learn all you ever wanted to know, and then some from Dom. He has built a wonderfully fun and informative website.

     We have established a very nice raw milk Kefir cheese aged for 60 days or more. We use full cream in our cheese! With Dexter milk that means a lot of luscious, rich cream.

     Our new cheese is called Kefir cheese. Here are a few pictures of our cheese.

Enjoy!!