Kefir Cheese Labneh Balls
These marinated Labneh balls are low in lactose, high in nutrition, and alive with probiotic goodness. Kefir was most likely used to make the world's earliest cheeses, which radiated out from what are now Asia Minor, the Caucus Mountains and North West India with nomadic herders. The world’s earliest known cheese was recently discovered as little lumps or balls placed around the neck of a well-preserved mummy unearthed in north-western China. The cheese was dated to about 1600 BCE, and was made from kefir milk. More on that below, but first, what is this kefir stuff anyway?
Kefir is the milk of goats or cows fermented by the kefir grains - a symbiotic community of pro-biotic yeasts and bacteria. During this process, a few things happen. The lactose content of the milk is greatly reduced as glucose is converted to lactic acid by lactobacillic fermentation, milk proteins are converted to beneficial enzymes, amino acids and vitamins, high numbers of probiotic bacteria and yeasts are formed (including yeasts that keep Candida albicans in check), and the colony produces a polysaccharide for kefiran which has been the subject of recent studies showing its beneficial effect on multiple medical conditions, particularly those with an autoimmune or digestive basis.
So, kefir is similar to yogurt, but much, much better for us. I say:
Kefir is to yogurt as love is to like
OK, lets get started on these balls.
Kefir Cheese Labneh Balls
Step 1: drain the whey from the kefir milk, leaving just the solid curds. Place a strainer over a bowl, place some unbleached muslin or other fine cloth inside the strainer, and pour the kefir milk in (see below). Hope you’re not in a hurry, this takes about 24 hours for most of the whey to drain out.
Step 2: lift the cloth containing the still moist curds out of the strainer, put a fresh cloth in the strainer, and place the curd mass in that.
Step 3: gather up the cloth tightly around the curds, and twist. This will force more whey out, and may be left tightly wound for a few hours. Eventually the curds will be dry, but still tacky to the touch.
Step 4: open the cloth and mix a little Himalayan or sea salt into the curds with your fingers.Take small amounts of the curd, and roll between your palms to make a small ball shape. Lay these on a fresh cloth, fold the cloth over, and let the cloth soak up excess moisture. When the cloth is wet, replace it with a dry one, giving the balls a little rub to make them smoother. Repeat until the balls are quite dry.
Step 5: place the balls in a glass or ceramic container (that has a lid). Sprinkle with seasonings, here I used simply cracked black pepper and fresh basil leaves. Cover with a good quality olive oil, and place the lid on your container. The oil will preserve the balls sufficiently so they won’t need refrigeration.
Now, more on the recent early cheese discovery
World’s oldest cheese found - on mummies
http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/02/25/worlds-oldest-cheese/5776373/
Vintage Gouda may be aged for five years, some cheddar for a decade. They’re both under-ripe youngsters compared with yellowish clumps – found on the necks and chests of Chinese mummies – now revealed to be the world’s oldest cheese.
The Chinese cheese dates back as early as 1615 BC, making it by far the most ancient ever discovered. Thanks to the quick decay of most dairy products, there isn’t even a runner-up. The world’s best-aged cheese seems to be a lactose-free variety that was quick and convenient to make and may have played a role in the spread of herding and dairying across Asia.
“We not only identified the product as the earliest known cheese, but we also have direct … evidence of ancient technology,” says study author Andrej Shevchenko, an analytical chemist at Germany’s Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics. The method was “easy, cheap … It’s a technology for the common people.”
The cheese, like the mummies, owes its existence to the extraordinary conditions at Small River Cemetery Number 5, in northwestern China. First documented by a Swedish archaeologist in the 1930s, it sits in the fearsome Taklamakan Desert, one of the world’s largest. A mysterious Bronze Age people buried dozens of their own atop a large sand dune near a now-dry river, interring their kin underneath what looks like large wooden boats. The boats were wrapped so snugly with cowhide that it’s as if they’d been “vacuum-packed,” Shevchenko says.
The combination of dry desert air and salty soil prevented decay to an extraordinary degree. The remains and grave goods were freeze-dried, preserving the light-brown hair and strangely non-Asian facial features of the dead along with their felt hats, wool capes and leather boots. Analysis of the plant seeds and animal tissues in the tombs showed the burials date to 1450 to 1650 BC.
Some of the bodies had oddly shaped crumbs on their necks and chests. By analyzing the proteins and fats in these clumps, Shevchenko and his colleagues determined that they’re definitely cheese, not butter or milk. It’s not clear why people were buried with bits of cheese on their bodies, Shevchenko says, though perhaps it was food for the afterlife.
The analysis also showed the mummies’ cheese was made by combining milk with a “starter,” a mix of bacteria and yeast. This technique is still used today to make kefir, a sour, slightly effervescent dairy beverage, and kefir cheese, similar to cottage cheese.
If the people of the cemetery did indeed rely on a kefir starter to make cheese, they were contradicting the conventional wisdom. Most cheese today is made not with a kefir starter but with rennet, a substance from the guts of a calf, lamb or kid that curdles milk. Cheese was supposedly invented by accident when humans began carrying milk in bags made of animal gut.
Making cheese with rennet requires the killing of a young animal, Shevchenko points out, and the kefir method does not. He argues that the ease and low cost of the kefir method would have helped drive the spread of herding throughout Asia from its origins in the Middle East. Even better, both kefir and kefir cheese are low in lactose, making them edible for the lactose-intolerant inhabitants of Asia. The new results are reported in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science.
Scientists have found fragments of cheese-making strainers in Poland that date back more than 7,000 years, and there are Danish pots from 5,000 years ago that hold what may be butter or cheese, says bioarchaeologist Oliver Craig of the University of York in Britain. But he agrees that Shevchenko’s team has good evidence that their cheese is the record-holder for age.
Craig is more cautious about the new study’s suggestion that the cheese was made with kefir starter rather than rennet. That’s harder to prove, he says, because the proteins could have decayed too much to provide a definitive answer. He thinks a study of animal bones or pottery is needed to confirm that the cheese at the cemetery was part of a technological spread across Asia.
Whether the cheese was common in its day, it’s exceptional now. Usually if a dairy product is left to its own devices, “bacteria will get in and start to eat it away, liquefy it,” Craig says. “It’s just amazing it survived.”
Happy cheese making, for more on kefir, check out my webpage http://www.celestialroots.com/kefir.php