Adventures in yogurt-making
16 June 2019 11:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeI looked at prices for a 'food flask' to replace the Thermos I was using solely for the purposes of making cheap yoghurt, and they cost about twenty pounds; I'd have to save an awful lot of money on commercial yoghurt (and be a lot inherently fonder of the stuff than I am) in order to justify that.
So I did a bit of looking-up on the Internet as to whether it was possible to make yoghurt by keeping it warm in the oven, say, and saw someone suggest a 'Dutch oven'. And I had a brainwave that it might be possible to use my really big earthenware pot; I can't heat it on top of the stove, but pouring boiling milk into it would both act as part of the necessary cooling-down process and help to transfer the reservoir of heat energy to the pot. Unfortunately it is so big that I had to use rather more milk than I would normally have done, i.e. more than a commercial yoghurt-pot full!
I let it cool down -- probably rather too much, as I got distracted on the computer -- and put in two tablespoons of yoghurt instead of just rinsing out the bottom of the pot as usual, and left it for about four hours to see what would happen. Nothing. There was just cool-ish milk with some grainy lumps of old yoghurt at the bottom.
I decided I'd probably let it cool down too far and that the pot didn't retain the heat adequately, put the entire pot in the microwave (where it just fitted) and reheated the milk to warm-but-not-painful -- I don't have a thermometer, but then neither did the women who used to do this -- wrapped the pot in a couple of towels, and left it to stand again. About midnight I unwrapped it and had another look. The pot had cooled down but it was still full of liquid milk.
One final attempt overnight: I heated the pot for three minutes at 440W, which is the setting I'd normally use to raise a single mug of milk to 'hot but not boiling' for drinking purposes, made a nest of four towels in a cardboard box, and left it for eight hours or so. Considerably to my surprise, when I opened the box this morning the milk had all yoghurted. Not the sort of grainy set yoghurt I'd been getting previously (and that I had put in as 'seed material'), either, but thick creamy yoghurt like the stuff in the shops.
According to my reading on the Internet, you're supposed to get a more creamy result by heating the milk slowly rather than quickly to boiling point in the first place; I have no idea if it was the multiple reheatings or the rate at which I initially warmed it, and whether I had simply failed to leave the yoghurt long enough on previous occasions, but this time it worked. (The milk was no longer warm and hadn't set, so I doubt that simply leaving it longer would have worked, but we'll never know.)
Anyway, I've now demonstrated that it is possible to make yoghurt in my remaining utensils without a continuous heat source, given sufficient insulation... now all I have to do is find sufficient containers to hold a litre rather than a pint of yoghurt!
So I did a bit of looking-up on the Internet as to whether it was possible to make yoghurt by keeping it warm in the oven, say, and saw someone suggest a 'Dutch oven'. And I had a brainwave that it might be possible to use my really big earthenware pot; I can't heat it on top of the stove, but pouring boiling milk into it would both act as part of the necessary cooling-down process and help to transfer the reservoir of heat energy to the pot. Unfortunately it is so big that I had to use rather more milk than I would normally have done, i.e. more than a commercial yoghurt-pot full!
I let it cool down -- probably rather too much, as I got distracted on the computer -- and put in two tablespoons of yoghurt instead of just rinsing out the bottom of the pot as usual, and left it for about four hours to see what would happen. Nothing. There was just cool-ish milk with some grainy lumps of old yoghurt at the bottom.
I decided I'd probably let it cool down too far and that the pot didn't retain the heat adequately, put the entire pot in the microwave (where it just fitted) and reheated the milk to warm-but-not-painful -- I don't have a thermometer, but then neither did the women who used to do this -- wrapped the pot in a couple of towels, and left it to stand again. About midnight I unwrapped it and had another look. The pot had cooled down but it was still full of liquid milk.
One final attempt overnight: I heated the pot for three minutes at 440W, which is the setting I'd normally use to raise a single mug of milk to 'hot but not boiling' for drinking purposes, made a nest of four towels in a cardboard box, and left it for eight hours or so. Considerably to my surprise, when I opened the box this morning the milk had all yoghurted. Not the sort of grainy set yoghurt I'd been getting previously (and that I had put in as 'seed material'), either, but thick creamy yoghurt like the stuff in the shops.
According to my reading on the Internet, you're supposed to get a more creamy result by heating the milk slowly rather than quickly to boiling point in the first place; I have no idea if it was the multiple reheatings or the rate at which I initially warmed it, and whether I had simply failed to leave the yoghurt long enough on previous occasions, but this time it worked. (The milk was no longer warm and hadn't set, so I doubt that simply leaving it longer would have worked, but we'll never know.)
Anyway, I've now demonstrated that it is possible to make yoghurt in my remaining utensils without a continuous heat source, given sufficient insulation... now all I have to do is find sufficient containers to hold a litre rather than a pint of yoghurt!