i made yogurt!
Sep. 23rd, 2011 07:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7I'm dashing out the door to go away for the weekend so I figured if nothing else I'll crosspost here something I put on Tumblr. Which is a recipe, or a story, or maybe both.
My sister gave me a recipe to make my own yogurt literally years ago, and I have been intending to do it for that long. I finally had the combo of enough milk, and a tiny bit left in the bottom of a container of really good yogurt, and an opportune time and the inclination. It's hard to get a perfect storm like that, y'know?
Of course, I couldn't find the recipe, which I'd written on a piece of paper in... a notebook? Loose? Where did I... well, it's not a recipe so much as a set of instructions, and since they're simple, how hard could it be to just do?
They were a set of instructions given her by one of her housemates at Eco House at Cornell, a young... now I forget whether it was a man or woman, and whether he or she was named Ding or Deng. So I can't credit him or her properly, but I can credit my sister, who is an organic vegetable and egg-and-meat-chicken farmer in rural Illinois now. She, however, does *not* make her own yogurt, or cheese, which she used to do when she was a field biology intern, because apparently rural Illinois is lacking in a source of good, reasonably fresh milk.
But I live in NY State and we have perfectly good milk in the grocery store. I used whole milk, and don't know if it'd work with other kinds-- probably, but I don't consider most of that stuff actual "milk"-- if you're afraid of milk fat, which is really good for you, maybe you should just drink water!
So here's Ding/Deng's recipe, via my sister Ann, as well as I could remember it, which I'm only sharing since it seems to have worked. (It moved, looked, and tasted like yogurt when I put it away just now, so it's probably yogurt.)
Take about a cup, maybe two depending how big your container is, of whole milk. It's fine to do this with milk that's nearing or passing its expiration date; it's trying to become yogurt anyway. Put it in a saucepan and bring it to a boil for a little while-- I forget what the recipe said, so I just got it to that stage where it's trying to climb out, and then stood there and stirred it with a rubber spatula for a few minutes while I was also getting dinner ready, adjusting the heat sometimes so it didn't actually climb out of the pan. The original directions said something here about "marshmallow stage", which is probably what happens to milk when you boil it for the right amount of time. So I stirred it, and it was fluffy, and seemed to be kind of thickening a little.
Then I turned the heat off, gave it a good stir, and set it aside to cool. I remember this next bit pretty definitely: you have to wait until it is, and this is a quote from Ding/Deng (I'm pretty sure he was male, and also pretty sure it didn't matter much), who my sister had always considered pretty asexual, "until it is cool enough to touch with your breast". Which is a really vivid way to describe a temperature. I just let it sit until I was done making dinner.
Put it into some kind of bowl or container you can cover a little bit loosely, and stir in a small amount of yogurt you already have. I used like half a cup, because I had more left than I thought; I think you can do it with a lot less, proportionally, than that.
I should mention that since I've done a little brewing, I have powdered sanitizer on hand, and since I was rebottling cordials at the same time, I washed the yogurt stuff in the sanitizer too. Any fermentation process is liable to contamination, so I figured I'd minimize it, especially since I recently had a brush with MRSA and am paranoid about sanitation now.
Anyway, mix your proto-yogurt all up, and stick it in your covered bowl, and put it someplace warm. The top of the fridge is a good one, or the inside of your gas oven if you have a pilot light. I had just baked squash for dinner, so the oven was cooling, but still warm-- once it was a temperature I figured I could live inside, I put the bowl in there. (It was covered loosely with plastic wrap, so I figured, if it's cool enough that the plastic wrap won't melt, we'll be golden.)
I left it there overnight; I think it's supposed to be 12 hours, but maybe 24, but I also think it's not real precise. I could let it ferment a pretty short time because I only had a cup of new yogurt plus half a cup of old yogurt, so it was like cheater proto-yogurt.
Then I scraped it into a plastic (sanitized!) container to put into the fridge-- the original yogurt container my original yogurt had been in, as it happens. My little sister usually used mason jars for most of this stuff. And voila! You have yogurt.
My sister gave me a recipe to make my own yogurt literally years ago, and I have been intending to do it for that long. I finally had the combo of enough milk, and a tiny bit left in the bottom of a container of really good yogurt, and an opportune time and the inclination. It's hard to get a perfect storm like that, y'know?
Of course, I couldn't find the recipe, which I'd written on a piece of paper in... a notebook? Loose? Where did I... well, it's not a recipe so much as a set of instructions, and since they're simple, how hard could it be to just do?
They were a set of instructions given her by one of her housemates at Eco House at Cornell, a young... now I forget whether it was a man or woman, and whether he or she was named Ding or Deng. So I can't credit him or her properly, but I can credit my sister, who is an organic vegetable and egg-and-meat-chicken farmer in rural Illinois now. She, however, does *not* make her own yogurt, or cheese, which she used to do when she was a field biology intern, because apparently rural Illinois is lacking in a source of good, reasonably fresh milk.
But I live in NY State and we have perfectly good milk in the grocery store. I used whole milk, and don't know if it'd work with other kinds-- probably, but I don't consider most of that stuff actual "milk"-- if you're afraid of milk fat, which is really good for you, maybe you should just drink water!
So here's Ding/Deng's recipe, via my sister Ann, as well as I could remember it, which I'm only sharing since it seems to have worked. (It moved, looked, and tasted like yogurt when I put it away just now, so it's probably yogurt.)
Take about a cup, maybe two depending how big your container is, of whole milk. It's fine to do this with milk that's nearing or passing its expiration date; it's trying to become yogurt anyway. Put it in a saucepan and bring it to a boil for a little while-- I forget what the recipe said, so I just got it to that stage where it's trying to climb out, and then stood there and stirred it with a rubber spatula for a few minutes while I was also getting dinner ready, adjusting the heat sometimes so it didn't actually climb out of the pan. The original directions said something here about "marshmallow stage", which is probably what happens to milk when you boil it for the right amount of time. So I stirred it, and it was fluffy, and seemed to be kind of thickening a little.
Then I turned the heat off, gave it a good stir, and set it aside to cool. I remember this next bit pretty definitely: you have to wait until it is, and this is a quote from Ding/Deng (I'm pretty sure he was male, and also pretty sure it didn't matter much), who my sister had always considered pretty asexual, "until it is cool enough to touch with your breast". Which is a really vivid way to describe a temperature. I just let it sit until I was done making dinner.
Put it into some kind of bowl or container you can cover a little bit loosely, and stir in a small amount of yogurt you already have. I used like half a cup, because I had more left than I thought; I think you can do it with a lot less, proportionally, than that.
I should mention that since I've done a little brewing, I have powdered sanitizer on hand, and since I was rebottling cordials at the same time, I washed the yogurt stuff in the sanitizer too. Any fermentation process is liable to contamination, so I figured I'd minimize it, especially since I recently had a brush with MRSA and am paranoid about sanitation now.
Anyway, mix your proto-yogurt all up, and stick it in your covered bowl, and put it someplace warm. The top of the fridge is a good one, or the inside of your gas oven if you have a pilot light. I had just baked squash for dinner, so the oven was cooling, but still warm-- once it was a temperature I figured I could live inside, I put the bowl in there. (It was covered loosely with plastic wrap, so I figured, if it's cool enough that the plastic wrap won't melt, we'll be golden.)
I left it there overnight; I think it's supposed to be 12 hours, but maybe 24, but I also think it's not real precise. I could let it ferment a pretty short time because I only had a cup of new yogurt plus half a cup of old yogurt, so it was like cheater proto-yogurt.
Then I scraped it into a plastic (sanitized!) container to put into the fridge-- the original yogurt container my original yogurt had been in, as it happens. My little sister usually used mason jars for most of this stuff. And voila! You have yogurt.
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no subject
Date: 2011-09-23 02:15 pm (UTC)I'm incredibly immature, this made me laugh so hard I nearly spit coffee all over the place.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-23 03:24 pm (UTC)I want to try to make yogurt now. Stupid question: is the kind of yogurt that I like, which is Dannan and has blueberries and seems very sugary, the same as real yogurt? As in, could I make this yogurt, mix on my own fruit, and find it edible? Or is Dannon a sneaky sort of fake yogurt? It's pretty sweet so I suspect it's not healthy at all.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-23 07:52 pm (UTC)Dannon probably is real yogurt, but the best kind to use would be plain yogurt, unsweetened and unflavored, because the flavoring/sweetening would just get diluted and taste weird, and might not really work. I'd recommend buying some unflavored yogurt just to make the experiment-- and if it's live culture, or from a farm or something, even better; some of them, they let it ferment to make yogurt, but then pasteurize it to kill the bacteria, so they wouldn't work to start a new batch. The little grocery store near my house has really good tubs of yogurt from a creamery, so that's what I used; the Troy farmer's market has a little dairy farm that sells yogurt and Ann took her starter batch from some of that.
It's not that Dannon isn't healthy, it's probably just that it's full of flavorings and things. I buy frozen fruit at the grocery store and put some of it into my yogurt every morning, and if that's not sweet enough I add honey or maple syrup or something. Most of the commercial stuff I was buying had aspartame in it and that's something I really really don't want in my system, so I avoid it when I can get around to getting something better.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-23 08:02 pm (UTC)I'll try the yogurt, it sounds like a fun thing to do now that it's getting dark when I get home from work. Last year I made bread and pizza crusts but now that's gotten easy so it's not exciting, it's more like, "Oh, yeah, I guess I have to make more bread now."
I think my system lives on aspartame, but we've all gotta die of something.
When are your derby games? If you send me a schedule, perhaps I can try to make some plans, and if it turns out you're not skating, maybe we could cheer for your team together or something.