Kefir

[Benjamin Barrett]

On Dec 14, 2011, at 10:25 PM, Victor Steinbok wrote:

> Now
> you can find kefir (mostly made by Lifeway Products, but other brands
> are creeping in) in every Whole Foods or equivalent and some major
> supermarkets. Still, even kefir is far from achieving the status of
> yogurt.

While not having the status of yogurt, this is a surprising understatement.

I found kefir in a Safeway in Port Orchard, a city of just over 11K people, and in a Town and Country grocery store in Bainbridge Island, a city of 23K people, though both have a lot of tourists. (Both cities are liberal outposts; however, so these relative rural findings may not apply to other parts of the country.)

The Safeway had only Lifeway; the Town and Country had four or five brands with multiple flavors, and included goat and coconut kefirs.

In addition to cow's, goat's and sheep's milk, the Wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kefir) lists "soy milk, rice milk, and coconut milk, as well as other sugary liquids including fruit juice, coconut water, beer wort and ginger beer" as base ingredients for kefir.

Benjamin Barrett
Seattle, WA

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