I've been getting into yoghurt making recently and it's easy to see how bacteria rule the world.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
or signup to continue reading
Not necessarily in a productive manner if you stray outside their realms of 'acidophilisation'.
I'm not sure that's a word, but that's OK. I'm not sure what I've made is yoghurt yet.
Mastering the skill depends a lot on trial and error, and if I was on trial I'd be guilty of murdering a lot of milk in error thus far.
Ironic because the motivation to make yoghurt at home from scratch is driven by a desire to cut down on using plastic.
Unfortunately, in reducing the amount of plastic yoghurt containers I buy, I've been increasing the amount of milk purchased in plastic containers.
I don't own a cow, but I'm having one.
An inscrutable paradox which sums up the modern world, don't you think?!
Anyhow, milk is the source of yoghurt.
And if you make it wrong, milk ends up like a sauce you'd hesitate to feed your cat.
That said, it all goes down the same way and problem is, some of the early batches look like it's already come up.
Replication is a challenge for the aspiring cottage industry worker, but not necessarily replicating bad product.
Rather standardising quality output that justifies the time and effort heating, cooling and metaphysically simmering at the stove.
If I could sum it up in one word, I'd say thermometer.
A necessary investment after repeated failures to heat and cool the milk properly.
Yes, you can watch the bubbles slowly rise. But there is a saying in old school yoghurt making that the watched milk never boils over, until you take your eye off it.
Then it really makes a mess. And denatures milk protein in ways you'll never comprehend, let's face it, until you push on to whatever happens at the end.
Which is how I'd describe my overall approach to yoghurt making really.
Next step is cooling the milk, which without a thermometer is a similar dark art.
Dipping a finger in is recommended by some, if you want to introduce anthrax, if you listen to others.
A dodgy, cheap thermometer gives you a roughly reliable guide as to when to introduce the starter culture. Failing that, it can help tell if you have a cold.
And don't worry if it blows the budget, heightening a sense of economic folly already triggered by litres of squandered milk and empty containers laying around.
You're trying to do some good here, man!!.
"The starter" is a batch of live yoghurt you set aside from that last batch you boiled over. And which may consequently be dead. In the hope that it will infect the next batch, in a good way.
As alluded to a couple of sentences ago, you never really know until you have a go, but as Louis Pasteur might have once remarked about science, we live in hope.
Hope that it might not have been easier and cheaper to go to the shop and buy yoghurt. And hope that after 10 hours in a warm place, the yoghurt maker's fears ease.
I mean, the yoghurt sets properly.
