It turns out making your own yoghurt is one of the easiest things ever and it’s delicious- why’d I never do it before? Also, just after making it it’s still warm and has a slight skin on the top- a toothsome treat indeed!
All you need to do is boil some milk, let it cool to a warmish temperature, mix in a dollop of live yoghurt as a starter culture, and stick it somewhere warm for about 8 hours. I’m using a giant thermos to keep it warm which some very marvellous friends lent me, but you could also put it on top of your boiler or in some warm water.
Nb apparently if you don’t boil the milk enough, the yoghurt will be stringy. This first attempt’s a great consistency- soft curds, not runny.
I have a slight problem, however; viz or namely the starter culture. Once you’ve made one batch, you should be able to make the next batch with a bit of the old one, despite assorted dire health warnings to the contrary. However, it seems quite common for the bacteria to eventually fail and stop making yoghurt. When this happens, home yoghurt makers appear to advise buying some more live yoghurt from the shop and starting up again. Assuming I can’t find yoghurt in metal/glass, I won’t be able to buy any more. You can buy dried starter culture and stick it in the freezer, but I foolishly failed to do this before giving up plastic and I don’t know of any that’s packaged in another way.
Surely it must be possible to grow the yoghurt bacteria at home yourself? Or is this one of these things where it’s easy to mess it up and grow some carcinogenic fungus creation instead (possibly here I reveal my utter ignorance of biology)?
SOLVE MY PREDICAMENT, O READER OF THIS MISSIVE!!!
2 comments:
"The earliest yoghurts were probably spontaneously fermented by wild bacteria living on the goat skin bags carried by the Bulgars (people who began migrating into Europe in the second century AD and eventually settled in the Balkans at the end of the seventh century)."
All you need then is a goat-skin bag... perhaps someone has one on freecycle??
What? So ever since the Bulgars people've just been making yoghurt off the old yoghurt cultures? That can't be right!
What about leaving milk out in the sun...?
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