Ulcer?

[raw-al]

It doesn't have to be super small scale, but like maybe a quarter gallon to a half gallon of milk being used?  or is that super small scale?  lol.

I keep my milk in the fridge, I mean drinking milk raw isn't as big of a deal as eating meat raw.  Although I usually drink my milk in one day when I buy it, because I don't like how it tastes when it goes sour.. though maybe that's just the plastic taste?  They do come in plastic containers, but if I'm not keeping it in the fridge I try to drink it all as fast as I can.  I could easily transfer some to glass jars though, I have glass jars saved up.  I could also keep the quark in the fridge too, as long as it doesn't stink enough to make my dad notice and go through trying to find out what the smell is.

I tried some Kefir, Qephor brand made by the people who I get the raw milk from (Organic Pastures) and I don't really like it at all.  It just tastes like sour milk to me, I've never seen a Kefir that looked the consistency of yogurt.. Although I've looked and tried to find a raw yogurt, but I can't find any.  I've never really eaten the regular pasteurized yogurt either though, but I'm sure it tastes a heck of a lot better than Kefir. 

Are the Kefir grains needed to make quark?  I don't really want Kefir and I don't like Kefir, it's too sour for me.

My GF likes kefir and I like a small amount. We have it with raw honey and it is so tasty. The honey adds the sweet part which takes the edge off the sour aspect. The other thing is that we  make small amounts, so it is eaten very quickly, as it gets very sour if left too long. You can put it in the fridge but that makes it a bit harder to digest

[Wolf]

Okay I just bought a half gallon of milk today, and I poured about half of that into one of my old glass milk jars that I had from another brand of raw milk that was only in my store for a limited time unfortunately, and put that in the fridge.  So now, do I need kefir grains to make quark?  If so, well I don't have any.. but if not, please elaborate how to make quark for me!  I have the milk ready to make it.

I never tried Kefir with honey.. I don't usually mix my foods much, though, especially if they're raw..

[Wolf]

Well I'm probably going to end up drinking all my milk now since I don't want it to go sour.. but do please  tell me how to make quark for the next time i buy milk

[bharminder]

First, I would like to say that I find it funny that I have probably suffered worse health problems after starting to eat raw than I ever did eating SAD.. first I seemed to have developed either salmonella or e.coli (I was having abdominal pains/cramps after eating and sick-feeling diarrhea for about a week straight, which has never happened to me before) then I think I got a urinary tract infection (burning pain while urinating, eventually finding blood in my urine, which I have never had problems with before) and now I seemed to have developed what I think to be an ulcer (burning/cramping pain in my stomach in the same spot after eating certain things, which has never happened before).

However, all the benefits far outweigh these inconveniences I have suffered.  Increased energy, less sleep needed (and I used to sleep around 10+ hours a day), and most wonderfully, my acne slowly but surely disappearing.. I don't think I will ever go back to a commercial or SAD diet ever again, despite how much I miss the food.

But right now I have a problem.  Everytime I eat certain foods, mostly fruits or bee pollen or honey other than my manuka honey, I experience a burning pain in my stomach, almost immediately after consuming.  Now, lately my diet has mostly comprised of fruits, raw honey, raw milk, raw cheese, and raw grass-fed beef when I can get it.  The problem I've had lately is that the raw 100% grass-fed ground beef I usually got and ate from trader joe's has started to taste nasty to me, and the only raw meat that tastes good to me anymore is a grass-fed top sirloin that is almost always out of stock at my organics store.  Now, I also work at Domino's, a pizza place, so there is a LOT of temptation at work to eat pizza almost everyday.  To prevent this, I have normally been eating two pieces of toast right before work, made from very lightly toasted (like left for no more than a minute in the toaster) ezekiel low sodium bread, smothered in trader joe's organic unsalted peanut butter (the only ingredient on th list is organic dry roasted unblanched valenca peanuts), trader joe's raw organic honey, and sprinkled with organic cinnamon on top.  Now I know this isn't the best of things to eat, and that it is hardly raw, but I think it is a far better substitute than ending up eating pizza at work.  This is what comprised my diet when I first started feeling the pains, but about day or two after the pain started, the meat I like came into stock at my organics store, and I started eating raw beef everyday for a week, and since then I have been eating nearly 100% raw.. the only time I may not have was when I went with my father and grandpa to a restaurant for dinner on father's day, although luckily we went to a place that had fish, and I ate an ahi tuna steak sashimi, which was served to me raw, however I do not know if the soy sause or the wasabi or the ginger that I also ate with it was raw at all.  But it didn't cause me any problems, and other than that I have been eating completely raw, but my stomach is still causing me pain, and I don't know what to do about it, because I have run out of beef and my store wasn't in stock, and I can't get back there until Thursday.  I have been drinking plenty of water (I only drink fiji water, which has a pH of 7.8 ) and trying to avoid acidic foods, but that's just the thing.. I've been looking up which foods are acidic and which are alkaline, and it seems that a lot of the food I eat is actually alkaline, and a lot of the foods that don't bother my stomach are actually acidic, and it's all very confusing, and I don't know what to do.. I also read someone here that said a pitta diet is best for ulcers and stuff, but many of the foods on the allow list are what cause discomfort, and I also know that my digestion can't really be that hot, as my stools come out light-coloured.  I drank raw apple cider vinegar for the passed two days, but I've run out now, and I've also been eating a lot of raw manuka honey which doesn't cause problems, although my regular raw honey and my bee pollen caused the most discomfort.  

So, does anyone know anything that can help with a possible ulcer?  I've had this problem for nearly two weeks now..

Based on your original post in this thread, I think you should cut out or significantly reduce the honey, vinegar. Drink the milk if it is fresh....if it sours then it may also aggrevate your stomach, so reduce/avoid it.

all those foods I just mentioned ( honey, vinegar, and soured milk ) can aggrevate the stomach from my experience. In addition, you may try to drink some raw cabbage juice (either blend some cabbage up with some water and strain out the pulp, or use a juicer). . . cabbage juice is known to heal ulcers rapidly.

Good luck and these suggestions are based on my personal experience from similar situations.

[Wolf]

Thank you for your advice, but my ulcer has been gone or a while now.   

[Dorothy]

Hi Wolf. I lost my internet connection for most of last week.
The culture used to make quark is cultured buttermilk - not kefir. Can you get raw whole cultured buttermilk from your milk supplier? If you can everything will be much easier. Making the first batch of buttermilk there will be a lot of waste without a starter. The milk itself has the cultures but there is a process you need to go through to concentrate them if you can't just buy the buttermilk. The buttermilk is NOT traditional old-fashioned buttermilk that is leftover from making butter. It is whole milk that is cultured.

In a refrigerator you will be fine. Quark stays fresh an extremely long time when you remove most of the whey especially. That's quark cheese - quark with the whey removed.

I've never had any raw dairy concoction go sour to the point of making the fridge smell and I've had some for half a year.

The plastic bottles however are very dangerous. As a matter of fact - I am no longer getting my raw dairy because the last 4 deliveries there has a been a plastic smell when I make my butter. The milk is bottled the same day and only in the plastic a few hours and I take it straight out of the plastic when I get home and the bottles are kept in a climate controlled space during the day - and yet - I can smell it now with the heat in Texas. I'm not ordering milk again until it is cool out and a new shipment of bottles arrives or the farmer is willing to put it in glass for me. The last thing I want to do is eat plastic. My nose is more like my beagle's nose than most humans so I trust it. Plastic milk containers are dangerous things. Definitely remove your milk from those containers as soon as you possibly can and get milk that has been in them the shortest amount of time. I might not be able to eat any milk that has even touched those plastic containers any more. Since incorporating raw meat my sense of smell has gotten even stronger so it might be just that now I can smell it when before I didn't. I will probably now have to travel the long distances to the farm myself to get my milk put directly into glass containers. Good thing that raw dairy preserves so well in the fridge so I might only have to go once every two months to get my supply of milk to make my quark, whey, butter and hard cheese.

[eveheart]

Can you get raw whole cultured buttermilk from your milk supplier? ...

Silly me, I thought you were going to explain a method for making raw quark. I don't need a detailed account, but I was wondering how you get the curds to set without heating them.

[Dorothy]

You need cultured buttermilk to make quark as your starter. You can buy the buttermilk already made or you can spend a week or two making the buttermilk yourself which will entail throwing away some of the clabbered milk in the process of making the buttermilk. The buttermilk is like your yogurt cultures or your kefir grains. It's what you use to make quark. Do you have cultured buttermilk available to you? If you can buy it - it's easier.

[Dorothy]

Since I might not be able to come back here for a bit I thought I'd better leave instructions if you are able to buy the raw cultured buttermilk and don't have to make it. Making the buttermilk is harder and more complicated than making the quark. The quark is quite simple:

All you need to do is mix about 1 part buttermilk to 7 or less parts milk in something stainless or glass. Leave some buttermilk in the container and re-fill it. Leave the buttermilk out for the day and then put in the fridge until the next time. Leave the mixture of milk and buttermilk on your counter for 24 -48 hours at room temperature -- until it becomes a mass. I cover mine to keep out bugs. You get it to set by adding the culture and letting it grow just like you would yogurt or anything similar. The time it takes depends on temperature and the amount of buttermilk. The more buttermilk the less time it takes. Skim the cream off the top then drain off as much whey as you want to using a strainer to make it the consistency that you like best. I take out most of the whey because quark cheese and whey separately stay fresh longer and re-mix the quark with the whey when making milkshakes etc. You can add salt to make it taste like cottage cheese or honey and/or fruit to make it more like yogurt.

I have made enough that my husband made me a special press (up to 10 gallons of milk at a time), but for small amounts all you need is buttermilk, milk, a pot, a strainer and glass containers to store it in your fridge. It's one of the easiest things to make once you get used to it.

That's it.... The traditional German Quark and that Johanna Budwig would have used. Mix the quark with flax oil thoroughly and you have the core of her cure.

[raw-al]

So you can't make it from real buttermilk?

[eveheart]

So you can't make it from real buttermilk?

My take on it is that Dorothy is using cultured buttermilk to curdle the milk because cultured buttermilk contains a mesophilic culture, which does not need heat to cause fermentation. If you have real buttermilk, why not try adding milk and see if it curdles? My own preference would be to curdle the milk with kefir grains, since commerical cultures are usually limited to a measly few strains, whereas healthy kefir grains are more broad spectrum.

[raw-al]

MY GF was making butter as I typed so I now have the 1/7 BM/Milk mixture. Will know in a day or two. We typically use honey to make kefir.

[miles]

We typically use honey to make kefir.

How?

[Dorothy]

So you can't make it from real buttermilk?

There are two types of buttermilk so it's confusing. There is traditional buttermilk or old-fashioned buttermilk which is the buttermilk that is leftover from making butter. This however is NOT what is used to make quark. I have tried and the results are poor. In these modern times what is referred to as cultured buttermilk is actually whole milk with active culture added to it in the form of some buttermilk or from a starter culture where it is allowed to ferment - much like yogurt.

Quark is NOT clabbered milk btw. It is something else entirely. The use of the culture allows the fermentation to happen quickly to make something quite delicious and not very sour like clabbered milk is.

You make cultured buttermilk by continuing to clabber milk over and over throwing away most of it and adding fresh milk - getting it concentrated to the point where there is such an active colony of bacteria in it that it then is able to make fresh milk into quark within 24 hours when adding to whole raw milk.

Quark is a kin to cottage cheese. Cottage cheese is artificially made into a cheese using rennet whereas quark is made into a soft cheese by the activity of beneficial bacteria so quark is more healthful if one is looking to increase beneficial cultures in one's gut.

Hope that helps make it clearer.

[Finding]

I don't eat veggies anyways, but I do eat a lot of fruit, and right now I'm a bit low on my raw foods, and fruit's pretty much the only thing I got right now.

I almost never ate leafy greens, but did consume green juices, and began having a grinding and sometimes pulsing pain in my gut that would come on intermittently after eating.  They also made my guts feel tight so that at night I couldn't comfortably lay on my side.  The doctor said it was likely gastritis and prescribed antacids, which he said he had been taking for years, but I knew I wasn't doing that.

I mentioned to the doctor that the only thing that seemed to soothe it was when I ate salad, which gave me an idea.  I started eating a big bowlful of cabbage or kale every day, and it was soothed immediately and went away completely in a few weeks.  I still eat that bowlful almost every day now.  Cabbage/kale in particular has anti-ulcer properties.   

It also soothed some pulsing pains in various parts of my body that I hadn't mentioned to the doctor which I attributed to cancer but haven't paid for diagnosis yet.  That was a year and half ago and symptoms are still all subsided, unnoticeable most of the time.

[raw-al]

How?

Sorry Miles I had missed your post.

I have described it elsewhere in a thread but it is dead simple. Aajonus describes it well somewhere in his books.

Basically he says there are two types of bacteria in raw honey that make it perfect for making kefir. One bacteria makes the kefir and another strain keeps the bad bacteria from proliferating.

Basically you put a couple of teaspoons of raw unheated honey in 500 ML of milk, shake it up a bit and let it sit. We put it on top of the fridge because there is a small amount of heat rising from the coils in the back. In the winter it may take a few days but in the summer overnight may do the trick.

We get our milk every two weeks so we make kefir generally close to the time we get a new batch as the old stuff may be starting to turn off.