How to bake and reap Kefir’s Benefits?

One of the first questions I am asked out baking with Kefir is “How to bake and reap Kefir’s Benefits”. There are thousands of wonderful recipes online for making some wonderful dishes with kefir. But does heat kill the kefir? Well, read on and it will become clear.

Heat Kills

If heat kills kefir, what benefit would we derive from cooking or baking with it? I mean, the kefir is dead so it is not going to do your Gut much good is it?

So, first things first. It is known that kefir grains will not survive high temperatures. That is why it is not the best practice to buy commercially made Kefir products. These products are pasteurised and all the goodness of live Kefir is lost.

So why does everyone publish all these Kefir recipes on their blogs? Is it to let people follow the links to their sites to sell more Kefir products? The answer to this is an emphatic NO!

Kefir Beyond Baking

OK, So now we have baked with the kefir and it is now dead. What was the purpose? Well, consider this. If you eat meat, you are eating something dead, right? So too if you are a vegetarian, the veggies are dead and often cooked. Nonetheless, we derive goodness from meat and veggies, cooked or not.

There are a lot of vitamins and minerals in the kefir that your body can still benefit from. Yes, the Kefir grains are dead but the goodness is not.

Reap The Goodness Of Kefir After Baking

Kefir’s benefits are diminished slightly after being baked. But there are many nutrients still available to us in the heated (and often cooled) Kefir.

These kefir grains are still rich in proteins, sugars, lipids, vitamins, and minerals. The important nutrients in kefir that will not be destroyed due to heating are calcium, phosphorous, magnesium, tryptophan (an amino acid), folic acids, biotin, and Vitamins A, B2, B12, D, and K.

Your baked Kefir products still have incredibly important benefits for you.

Getting It All

Even if your bread, baked with kefir has no live Kefir culture left, You can still get it all! Make your own Kefir cottage cheese or hard cheese. Make a Kefir salad dressing to eat on your salad or make Kefir ice cream for dessert and put all those wonderfully healthy live Kefir grains into your body. Double the vitamins and minerals and the benefits of the live Kefir grains.

Conclusion

So yes, the heat does kill the live Kefir grains but, there are still tones of goodness in the Kefir grains that will benefit your health. It is definitely worth it to include kefir in your daily diet, whether with live Kefir grain products or backed/cooked food.

There are tons of Kefir recipes available to ensure that you get it all.

If you have any questions about this article or any Kefir-related questions, please leave them here.

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