How Milk Kefir Looks-This is what I am experimenting with to leaven pizza dough

These are some pictures of how milk kefir looks.  I am experimenting with different ways to leaven bread, bagels and pizza doughs, using the milk kefir.  Milk kefir is interesting to me, because it seems to ferment the dough slower than commercial or starters in dough.  At least that is my opinion up to this date.

These little milk kefir grains were sent to me on 10/23/10. I purchased them, to experiment with in pizza dough. I first fed them raw milk, but found out I can now feed them regular whole milk.  They are interesting to me because you can also drink the milk kefir in various ways or even raw.  I like to mix the milk kefir into a smoothie.  I milk kefir is almost like yogurt.  Milk kefir is supposed to have many friendly bacteria.  I couldn't believe I could let the milk kefir in the same milk for a week and still be able to drink it, without getting sick.  The friendly bacteria must have something to do with that.  From what I understand these milk kefir grains are very ancient.

So far my results with using milk kefir in pizza dough, does show some interesting results. I have added the milk kefir directly to pizza dough and now am using a poolish with milk kefir to leaven doughs for pizzas.  I don't know why some of these pictures are sideways.  I did flip them.  Sorry if anyone is interested how the pictures are sideways. :(

Norma

Monthly Challenge "Harvest" November 2009

My submission for the "Fall Harvest" on November 17, 2009 on pizzamkaking.com was a Lehmann dough using KASL.  I baked 3 kinds of squash, (spaghetti, butternut, and acorn).  I used my basic pizza sauce, cheeses and then added the baked squash.  The spaghetti squash was really interesting.  I topped with a little fresh basil and parsley.  The Fall Harvest Pie turned out well and tasted good.  It sure was colorful.  Since squash really doesn't have a lot of flavor it went well with the pizza.
Norma

Milk Kefir Pizza, two more attempts

Two more attempts were made with using a milk kefir poolish in the pizza dough.  The milk kefir poolish does leaven pizza dough, but it is slower in my opinion that either commercial yeasts or other starter.  The one milk kefir poolish dough was made the Friday before and the other milk kefir poolish dough was made 11 days before I used the dough ball to make the second set of pictures of pizzas.  Both of these dough balls were baked into a pizza on 11/23/10.

Norma