yogurt

[Thea Maria Carlson]

hello everyone ~

i just wrote up my method for making home-made yogurt on my blog, and
thought some of you might be interested.
http://soilandsenses.wordpress.com/2012/01/25/how-to-make-amazing-yogurt/
enjoy!

thea

[Lara Oppenheimer]

Thanks, Thea!  Your instructions are clear & simple. I have been wanting to make yogurt with my daughter and now I am actually going to do it!

[Deborah Niemann]

Have you ever made it without heating the milk to 180 degrees first? I'm curious about whether you would see a difference in the finished product. I *think* the whole point of heating it to 180 is simply to pasteurize the milk. I've been making yogurt for ten years with our goat milk, and although we used to make it with pasteurized milk, we now make it with raw, and it still works fine. We basically bring it straight in from the goat, add culture and stick it in our yogurt maker, which is electric, so it heats it up to 110 without us having to do anything. You are already using pasteurized milk, so heating to 180 seems like a needless step.

Also, I wouldn't necessarily say that any commercial yogurt will work. The labels say that they contain live cultures at the point of production. That doesn't mean they still have live cultures when you buy it. I know someone who called a number of yogurt manufacturers, and none of them would tell her the temperature at which they package the yogurt. They kept saying it was a trade secret. Problem is that if they heat it above 135, they kill the cultures. I only tried using commercial yogurt once to make yogurt, and it failed completely, so I wasn't going to waste any more of my goat milk on that. I buy live cultures from a cheesemaking supply house. They cost next to nothing per batch -- it's actually much cheaper than using store-bought yogurt as starter.

Deborah

--
Deborah Niemann
author of Homegrown and Handmade, available now!
http://antiquityoaks.blogspot.com
815-358-2450 preferred number
815-341-1223

"Don't wait for the muse. She has a lousy work ethic. Writers just write." -- Barbara Kingsolver

[Breanne Heath]

Just thinking back to making mozzarella... It has to be in a salt water or whey bath at 180 to get nice and stretchy.  Something must be happening to the milk proteins or enzymes at that temperature. 

I have done both and I do think yogurt to 180 creates a thicker yogurt than to 110.  

I just googled this a bit and found that whey protein coagulates at 172, so I think that might be what is going on.  Since milk is pasteurized between 135-165 it makes sense that you would still need to heat the milk to 172-180 to coagulate whey protein for thicker yogurt.  I do wonder if that is the trade secret they are guarding.  By coagulating the whey, the yogurt is naturally thicker without added thickeners or straining. 

Ultra pasteurized milk is heated to 275 so I think somewhere between 172 and 275 the whey protein is destroyed, which is why u.p. milk doesn't work for cheesemaking.

Breanne

[Deborah Niemann]

I know there is a lot written about what you must and must not do when making cheese, yogurt, etc, but I've found a lot of it to be false. I made yogurt from pasteurized milk for seven or eight years because everything I'd read up to that point said that you had to use pasteurized milk or it wouldn't turn into yogurt. Ironically, I always pasteurized at 145 when making yogurt back then, because if it got much above 160, it would be thinner. My yogurt made from raw milk gets nice and thick and is never heated above 110. The biggest difference I've seen between thinner and thicker batches is the culture used. Since I've started using the culture from The Dairy Connection, my yogurt has been the thickest ever. I have read in multiple places that it should be heated to 180, but I kind of think it's one of those things that just keeps getting repeated because no one tries it at different temperatures -- like the hundreds of people on the forum who all insisted you had to use pasteurized milk to make yogurt.

I've actually never heard that mozz has to be in salt water or a whey bath at 180 to get stretchy until just now when I read your email, and I've been making stretchy mozz for years. That actually sounds dangerous -- are you stretching it at 180 degrees? My mozz never gets above 130-140, and if it does get above that, it doesn't really stretch. It just starts falling apart until it cools off a little. And I've used both goat and cow milk for mozz with the same procedure and same results.

Personally I think that the yogurt companies just don't want to admit they're heating the yogurt above 135 when packaging it because that would mean the cultures are dead. They were willing to tell her everything about the process except for the packaging temperature. Besides, many of the mainstream companies do include gelatin and other thickeners.

Deborah