I found another hole in the sleeve when I attempted to put it on this evening -- currently wearing a hand-knit (not by me!) sleeveless jerkin instead...
I tested out the new Thermos with a batch of yoghurt last night; I was afraid I'd mixed the milk with the yoghurt while it was still too hot, and/or that it wouldn't stay warm when the Thermos was only half full. (This flask is twice the size of the old 'large' one, big enough to hold tea for five or six people -- but the whole point of getting another Thermos was so that I wasn't forced to make yoghurt in sufficiently large volumes to keep the earthenware pot warm all night!) However it yoghurted all right, and came out still warm in the morning. I had forgotten the nuisance value of trying to extract solid yoghurt through a narrow flask neck, and of trying to clean the inside of the flask afterwards. I'm sure I used to have a longer bottle-brush when I was doing this before....
The weird thing was that the yoghurt turned out to have gone really grainy, which I've never seen. Apparently this is either the result of having heated up the milk too fast (probably) or else of having bought the 40p yoghurt rather than the £1.10 yoghurt as a new 'starter'; cheap yoghurt can have additional thickeners and additives that make it behave a bit oddly if you attempted to breed from it... https://saladinajar.com/yogurt/why-is-my-homemade-yogurt-grainy/
Presumably if it was just the milk, then using the grainy yogurt as the starter for the next batch should be all right. (That web page says that you need to buy fresh starter after only three or four batches, but I only ditched my previous one after I left it too long and it started to smell cheesy; surely people have been making yoghurt from previous yoghurt for thousands of years without a break, just as beer yeasts have continuous lineages?)
no subject
I tested out the new Thermos with a batch of yoghurt last night; I was afraid I'd mixed the milk with the yoghurt while it was still too hot, and/or that it wouldn't stay warm when the Thermos was only half full. (This flask is twice the size of the old 'large' one, big enough to hold tea for five or six people -- but the whole point of getting another Thermos was so that I wasn't forced to make yoghurt in sufficiently large volumes to keep the earthenware pot warm all night!)
However it yoghurted all right, and came out still warm in the morning. I had forgotten the nuisance value of trying to extract solid yoghurt through a narrow flask neck, and of trying to clean the inside of the flask afterwards. I'm sure I used to have a longer bottle-brush when I was doing this before....
The weird thing was that the yoghurt turned out to have gone really grainy, which I've never seen. Apparently this is either the result of having heated up the milk too fast (probably) or else of having bought the 40p yoghurt rather than the £1.10 yoghurt as a new 'starter'; cheap yoghurt can have additional thickeners and additives that make it behave a bit oddly if you attempted to breed from it...
https://saladinajar.com/yogurt/why-is-my-homemade-yogurt-grainy/
Presumably if it was just the milk, then using the grainy yogurt as the starter for the next batch should be all right. (That web page says that you need to buy fresh starter after only three or four batches, but I only ditched my previous one after I left it too long and it started to smell cheesy; surely people have been making yoghurt from previous yoghurt for thousands of years without a break, just as beer yeasts have continuous lineages?)