Making Yogurt At Home

[freemonkey]

I love yogurt, but I know the stuff I buy in the store probably has more junk in it than is good for me. I bet it would be fun to experiment with new flavors, too. So I'm thinking of getting a yogurt maker. I've been reading a little about it, and I know a special maker is not necessary, but a self-contained unit is better for my needs.

Has anyone dabbled in this? Any equipment recommendations? Recipes? Funny yogurt stories?

[Petra]

I make my own yoghurt with a cheap yoghurt maker, and it's easy to do and very delicious.

When I was a hippy living in the hills around Byron Bay, Australia - second only to Goa in India for new age, mother-earth-combined-with-ecstasy-rave-culture hippydom - I used to make yoghurt from scratch without a maker, but the yoghurt maker is so easy and the results are more consistent.

[livius drusus]

I made it once when I was fresh out of college the old fashioned cheese cloth way. It took ages, but the final product was creamy and delicious and my sense of satisfaction was downright Amish in its intensity.

I don't know anything about yogurt makers, I'm afraid, but I'll look around. :)

[RevDahlia]

I posted about making yogurt in my journal a couple months back -- am happy to repost it here. Unfortunately my recipe accompanied a lengthy complaint about my oven; I fear that my oven's overall shittiness is key to its facility at producing yogurt. I have never had a problem making yogurt from scratch, although it is a little time-consuming and it gets lots and lots of implements dirty. It is worth it, however.

Yogurt

You need:
2.5 cups milk (I use 1%)
2 tbsps plain store-bought yogurt (lowfat or whole-fat, but not nonfat, and you're probably better off if you start with active-culture organic yogurt)

Special equipment:
A saucepan, a Mason jar with a lid, some dish towels, a candy thermometer, a whisk, and a horrible cantankerous stove that raises the surrounding temperature about 30 degrees even if you only have one burner on the range on for three minutes. (If you do not have such an implement, you can probably turn your stove on to about 300 for 10 minutes or so, the turn it off before you get started.)

Put the milk in a saucepan over medium heat and let it foam up once. Drop heat to the barest simmer; simmer for two minutes. Turn off heat and allow milk to cool to 110 degrees, which will take about 5 minutes (depending on how dreadful your stove is.)

Put the yogurt in a small bowl, and very thoroughly whisk some of the milk into it. Then whisk the yogurt/milk mixture into the rest of the milk. Decant it into the Mason jar. Swaddle the jar in dish towels and put its lid on, then park it in the oven overnight. In the morning, put it in the fridge, and when it cools it will be yogurt. (Or maybe soup. I have not had this problem since the advent of the wretched blight on my life that is the stove, but yogurt soup is very nice when whizzed in the blender with jam. Then you can call it a smoothie.)

[Petra]

Told ya yoghurt makers were easier. :giggle:

[viscousmemories]

Really. If I'm gonna go through all that I might as well go all the way and get a :bcow:

[freemonkey]

Told ya yoghurt makers were easier. :giggle:
but a self-contained unit is better for my needs
This part of my post should have read,
"but I don't want to spend hours at it, or have to clear counter space, or wash all kinds of dishes, or remember that I have something in my old 1970's-ish oven, or that I have to take its temperature, or...."

Other than all that, Rev, your recipe sounds easy & delicious (especialy the delicious part). :giggle:

[RevDahlia]

Told ya yoghurt makers were easier. :giggle:
but a self-contained unit is better for my needs
This part of my post should have read,
"but I don't want to spend hours at it, or have to clear counter space, or wash all kinds of dishes, or remember that I have something in my old 1970's-ish oven, or that I have to take its temperature, or...."

Yeah, no matter how you slice it making yogurt from scratch is a serious PITA. I think it's best for people who only want to make yogurt occasionally. If you want it all the time, DEFINITELY get a yogurt maker.

[lisarea]

Wow. That's weird. I totally have to make yogurt either tomorrow or the day after.

I use a yogurt maker just because I have one and it's easiest that way. All it really does, though, is keep it at a consistent temperature--I think around 100 degrees--while it cultures. You could accomplish the same by just putting it in a warmish place inside a towel-lined cooler if you're afraid you'll remember it's in the oven.

Also, regular homemade yogurt tends to come out runny that way. More like a lassi than the eatin' yogurt you get over to the store, you know. If you want it thicker, probably the quickest and easiest way is to just add a packet of unflavored gelatin. (Most store boughten yogurts have thickeners of some sort in them.)

It really is pretty easy, though, even the Right Reverend's way. Seriously. She's just making it look hard to show off or something.

Edit: I just remembered that they have yogurt makers in the thrift stores all the time. The yogurt containers are usually thick little glass jars, too, so you should be able to wash all the cooties off pretty handily, and it should only cost three bucks or so.

[freemonkey]

I've been looking at yogurt makers online and it seems there's 2 kinds. The ones with the little glass jars and the ones with the 1 quart tub. I can't decide which is better, because I can't find many reviews. A couple said that the little jars were a pain to fill.

But for 3 bucks..... I'll take a look at Goodwill. I don't remember seeing any there, but then again, I wasn't looking, either.

Also, re: runny yogurt. Two things I read, but am too lazy to look up again. One was that you can scald the milk to kill the little enzymesrother that make it runny. Or you could add some powered dry milk (or something).

[sakrilege]

I make yogurt all the time with a 1 quart maker. I use about 6-7 oz powdered milk, 2 Tbls yogurt as starter and water. The nice thing about the powdered milk is that you don't have to preheat it since the powdering process does that but the taste of the end product isn't affected IMO. I just put everything in the yogurt maker container, whip it up with an immersible blender and pop it into the yogurt maker. Thickness is controlled with the amount of powdered milk, really thick can be accomplished with 8 oz.

For the yogurt started, I buy Dannon and freeze it in 2 Tbls amounts. These will last several months viable in the freezer.

Susan

[LadyShea]

What's the point if you have to use store bought yoghurt in the recipe? Surely there's a way to create the cultures on your own as well?

[Ensign Steve]

Yogurt, like bread, requires a 'starter' to get, well, started. I don't know exactly what it entails to get the original starter, but I guarantee you it's got to be a million times more complicated than using a spoonful or two of the storebought.

Anyway, what you could do is just use the storebought the first time, and then freeze a little of your result to use as a starter next time. ;)

[Ensign Steve]

Okay, now I have become mildly obsessed with finding out how the original starter is created. Every site google points me to has basically the same thing to say. "Use storebought yogurt for starter." What the FUCK do the stores use?! Is it magic? ;)

wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoghurt)(emphasis mine)
Home made yoghurt is consumed by many people throughout the world, and is the norm in countries where yoghurt has an important place in traditional cuisine, such as Turkey, Bulgaria and India. Yoghurt can be made at home using a small amount of store-bought plain live active culture yoghurt as the starter culture. One very simple recipe starts with a litre of low-fat milk, but requires some means to incubate the fermenting yoghurt at a constant 109.4°F (43°C) for several hours. Yoghurt-making machines are available for this purpose. As with all fermentation processes, cleanliness is very important.

[freemonkey]

What's the point if you have to use store bought yoghurt in the recipe? Surely there's a way to create the cultures on your own as well?
I've read that you can buy the little beasties that make yogurt yogurty, but like Steve says, its probably easier to use the store-bought as a starter.

I was just about to place my order for this. (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00004SUHY/ref=wl_it_dp/103-2409212-1964614?%5Fencoding=UTF8&coliid=I60OEOI1SWRQ1&v=glance&colid=2P7FJO0U9EHIX)

[Ensign Steve]

Yah, one of the other sites says you can buy freeze-dried cultures, but it's really expensive.

[freemonkey]

Yah, one of the other sites says you can buy freeze-dried cultures, but it's really expensive.
Not too expensive (http://www.healthgoods.com/Shopping/Appliances/Yogurt_Makers.asp) (scroll about halfway down the page to CBA Probiotic Yogurt Starter). Unless you have to place a minimum order or something. But I'm wondering if a well-stocked health food store has it.

[lisarea]

I'm kind of talking out of my ass here, but I think the problem with culturing your own yogurt from scratch would be from cultivating the right bacteria. It can be done from scratch, obviously, because someone had to at some point, but I don't know how one would go about attracting it naturally. Manufacturers, I'm sure, just have a source where they get reliable freeze-dried cultures. Maybe the regions in which yogurt was originally common have the right bacteria just floating around or something, like San Francisco has Candida humilis and Lactobacillus sanfrancisco floating around to make the unique sourdough you can only get in San Francisco.

Different dairy cultures. (http://fiascofarm.com/dairy/cultures.html)

I've been screwing around with wild yeast for the past week or so, and I have a levain growing in the kitchen right now, but I think in that case, the flour used to start the culture pretty reliably contains the elements it requires to get started.

I'm guessing that yogurt cultures maybe are just more common in the Middle East or wherever yogurt originated. Maybe it occurs more frequently in goat milk or something, or even more specifically in the milk of goats with a particular diet native to the region or something. It probably happened accidentally at first, and people started saving the cultures from those accidents to replicate the results intentionally.

But again, I'm kind of talking out of my ass, because I can't find a reliable explanation of it either.

[LadyShea]

I asked the question because I have made sourdough starter, sure it's better to have some given to you but you can make it from scratch. I don't get why there isn't a recipe for yoghurt starter.

[Ensign Steve]

Oooh! Do tell! Did you use magic? :magic:

[LadyShea]

Oooh! Do tell! Did you use magic? :magic:

No magic necessary! It can be made with just flour and water, but there are other recipes that use buttermilk, honey, beer, extra yeast, etc. for change in flavor.

[TomJoe]

You could always order Streptococcus thermophilus and Lactobacillus bulgaricus from the ATCC (http://www.atcc.org). The cultures will run you from around $25 to $200. Of course, you'll eventually have to worry about bacteriophage killing off your cultures, but in the meantime... you'll be good to go.

[lisarea]

I think--again, I'm sort of talking out of my ass because I don't understand it entirely myself--the strains that create a levain or sourdough are much more generic than the ones that create yogurt. They're in the air and in the flour itself, and all they need is a warm, conducive environment in which to grow. The specific strains differ depending on what you make the starter from and where you make it. Which is why sourdough/levain varieties vary so much by region. Like, they're all very different things, within a broad category of 'yeasts.' So, like, maybe a San Francisco sourdough is to Alaskan sourdough as yogurt is to buttermilk or something. And what about salt-rising breads? They're really hard to get started, at least for me. (OK. Change 'hard' to 'so far impossible.') My point being that I think maybe you can have any of a bajillion different discrete wild yeasts you can use to leaven bread to maybe only a few cultures that will create yogurt specifically. If the incubation environment is similar, maybe you could culture something, but you wouldn't know if it'd be some kind of soft cheese, or sour cream, or yogurt, or what, until you did it.

So maybe the cooties that turn milk into yogurt, in other words, are just less common, more specific to yogurt, and/or more difficult to pick out of the environment than the broad category of the cooties that turn flour into yeast.

Now that I think about it, maybe the fact that most milk is pasteurized might make it more difficult, too. Maybe you could actually do it yourself more easily with raw milk?

I would actually really appreciate it if some science person would clear all this up, because for some stupid reason now I really want to know, and I am confused, and when I get confused, I ramble uncontrollably.

In case you didn't pick up on that or something.

[TomJoe]

Now that I think about it, maybe the fact that most milk is pasteurized might make it more difficult, too. Maybe you could actually do it yourself more easily with raw milk?


I've never made yogurt, nor am I completely familiar with the yogurt making process however, whether the milk is pasteurized or not, I do not think it makes a difference. Yogurt has been in the diets of people in Eastern Europe well before pasteurization techniques had come to be invented, so raw milk probably would work just fine, but pasteurized milk would work equally well. I might think that pasteurized milk might work better because then, when you add your culture (two species particularly... Streptococcus thermophilus (http://genome.jgi-psf.org/draft_microbes/strth/strth.home.html) and Lactobacillus bulgaricus), they have no other competition, meaning that your yogurt will more often be "good yogurt" rather than "spoiled milk".

[lisarea]

I've never made yogurt, nor am I completely familiar with the yogurt making process however, whether the milk is pasteurized or not, I do not think it makes a difference. Yogurt has been in the diets of people in Eastern Europe well before pasteurization techniques had come to be invented, so raw milk probably would work just fine, but pasteurized milk would work equally well. I might think that pasteurized milk might work better because then, when you add your culture (two species particularly... Streptococcus thermophilus (http://genome.jgi-psf.org/draft_microbes/strth/strth.home.html) and Lactobacillus bulgaricus), they have no other competition, meaning that your yogurt will more often be "good yogurt" rather than "spoiled milk".

Well, yeah, part of the problem is encouraging the desired cooties, and discouraging the other ones. But the question was whether you could culture them naturally, without actually adding the strain. That's the way you do it with a yeast starter: You just mix up some flour and water and leave it in a warm place, no additives necessary, and after a while, it creates a wild yeast from the cooties it finds in the flour and in the air. So: Where do the yogurt cooties occur naturally? The air? The milk? Some combination thereof? And how would one go about isolating and cultivating them without specifically adding them?

[freemonkey]

My yogurt maker came a few days ago. I have already made 2 batches of yogurt, both yummy!

[livius drusus]

That's great, freemonkey. Which yogurt maker did you end up buying? What kind of yogurt have you made so far?

[freemonkey]

This one (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00004SUHY/qid=1107704414/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-2773329-2553761?v=glance&s=home-garden&n=507846) , which is really just an electric self-contained temperature-controlled incubator. Looks like the price has gone down by more than a dollar since I got mine. (damn you, Amazon :shakefist: )

I've made it with skim and 2% milk, plus a combination of both, and I've varied the processing time, which affects the degree of tartness. All good.

Some of the flavors I've experimented with are pineapple & cinnamon (way better than you'd expect), raspberry, mixed berry, vanilla, and my personal fav so far, instant chai tea powder :yup: (yes, really). I've also used some for making a zesty ranch dressing.

I'm gonna try chocolate one day, and thinking those bottled coffee flavorings would be great to use, too.

[Legs]

I received a yogurt maker as a wedding gift years ago and thought "WTF"? However, as it turns out, long after my husband has departed my yogurt maker is still with me and dear to my heart.

I use it to make tzatziki which is plain yogurt flavoured with lemon, garlic & cucumber and I put it on lamb roast, or chicken/beef skewers with rosemary.

I can't believe how inexpensive your yogurt maker was at Amazon, the one I have was surely a couple of hundred dollars back then.

Let us know how the chocolate one works out.