Tips for making (firm) yogourt.

Yogourt is a traditional way of preserving milk and enhancing nutrition–and by making it I have avoided also making a literal wall of empty plastic yogourt containers. I have been making yogourt for many years now, and I think I finally understand it well enough to be able to laugh at my mistakes. So this is going to be a pile of trivia, some links, some science, and a summary of my current method.

How about we laugh first? Or skip straight to the instructions if you like.

Back in the day, I could not get my yogourt to be as firm as I would like so I started adding powdered milk. By increasing the milk solids, I did get firmer yogourt.

This is stretching my memory of the chain of events, but I think I then had the bright idea that I could make yogourt entirely from powdered milk, which would allow me to buy a bulk sack of dried milk and save money.

I also used to not pasteurize my milk, reasoning the bottling plant or the drying plant had already done that. This saved me a lot of electricity, and also eliminated the fussiest parts of yogourt-making, getting the right temperature at each step. Knowing what I do about food poisoning in the industrial food system, I am horrified I published this and I dearly hope nobody died after following my instructions.

But I understand fermentation a lot better now,Read my opus on sauerkraut for the detail on fermenation. google has more stuff in it, and also, we saw Sandor Katz speak.

Firm yogourt

Heat the milk up, and hold it at temperature for a period of time.

After years of googling and silliness with powdered milk I finally came across a paper on industrial yogourt production that talked about denaturing whey proteins by heating the milk to a temperature and holding it for a set time. Hotter is a shorter time, and cooler is a longer time. 

“The temperature/time combinations for the batch heat treatments that are commonly used in the yogurt industry include 85°C for 30 min or 90-95°C for 5 min”

This step may be adequately met in the traditional scalding stage, which may be why many people make good yogourt without knowing this info–whereas my newfangled low-temperature-powdered-milk yogourt was never very firm.

Here is a very readable article which has an interesting temperature method. They mention the scientists Lee and Lucey, which, if you google them, you will find a ton of papers on yogourt science, including the quote about temperature above.

If you want thick Greek-style yogourt, you can leave the yogourt in a fine mesh strainer so some of the whey drips out.

Reusing yogourt as a starter

The next mystery of yogourt is that when you make a batch using grocery store yogourt as the starter, it always seems to poop out after about a half dozen lifecycles. We saw Sandor Katz, Fermenting Guru, speak,That talk was mind-boggling. Among other things, he said that how we think about probiotics is wrong. When you eat probiotics you introduce a few billion bacteria into your gut, which has trillions of bacteria in it–your puny probiotics are just not that big a deal. However, Sandor said the research is showing our gut bacteria treat the probiotics as a sort of toolbox. They can pick and put down bits of DNA as they need. Mind. Blown.

Anyhow, here is Sandor on yogourt.
and he said that is simply a consequence of commercial cultures.

And when you think of it, of course that makes sense. Our ancestors in yogourt-eating societies did not have labs and sterile workspaces to replicate and freeze-dry cultures. So either it was being refreshed from the environment, or the culture itself did not weaken after a few lifecycles. Katz says the latter. Some heritage cultures reproduce indefinitely, and some have additional properties favoured by different cultures, like the challengingly-textured Finnish Viili, or “ropy yogourt”.

I find I usually go out of town, or clean out the yogourt jar and eat my starter, or have some other life event interrupt me before my starter loses performance so I like to keep a few pouches of Yogourmet around. Yogourmet is a common starter culture available in better health food stores, often in the refrigeration section. I would expect you would find it in “ethnic” stores as well, like Greek, and maybe Indian. It comes in a box with several pouches of freeze-dried culture.

Heating tips

The basic rule is to heat milk slowly and cool it quickly. This prevents burnt flavours, and reduces the chances of pathogens infecting the milk as it cools. At this stage, milk is warm, wet, and full of protein, so it is a bacterial playground. Ice or cool baths might be used in cheesemaking, but for yogourt I just wait until it has cooled down naturally. The milk will be inoculated with billions of acid-producing bacteria that create an inhospitable environment for spoilage causing bacteria.

I have fermented yogourt in all sorts of ways. I have a giant Korean cooking thermos–a thermal cookerSadly, this is not the model I have, but I think thermal cookers are very cool. You can cook beans, rice, cook oatmeal overnight–all without any more energy than what is used in the first heating phase. They are simply hayboxes made of modern materials.–which does a great job, I have wrapped blankets around pots, I have tried a crockpot, I have made a giant bain-marie, some people use a sous-vide. I had a two litre electric yogourt maker–the multiple tiny pots do not suit our eating style–and it worked great until it died.

But the best by far is our current house, which has an old gas stove with a pilot light.My mother used to start tomato seedlings on a gas stove with pilot lights. She put the pots on cookie sheets on top of the stove and the bottom heat provided very reliable germination.  It holds a wonderful incubating temperature inside the oven, so after I have inoculated the milk, I just put the pot inside the oven and walk away.

Lastly, here is an amazingly useful tool for making yogourt and cheese. This thermometer’s alarm will sound for both High and Low temperature settings, so it will tell you when your milk is hot enough, and then it will tell you when your milk has cooled enough for inoculation. This just saves a ton of fussing and allows me to do other things without boiling over or forgetting milk until it is too cold.

How to make (firm) yogourt

I typically make two litres of yogourt at a time, as it keeps nicely.

Over low to medium heat, warm milk to 95°Celsius (205°F) and hold it there for five minutes.If you are using a thermal cooker/blankets/haybox, you could heat to 90°C, then insulate it for a half hour, which will still hit the temperature targets needed to denature the whey prteins.

Let the milk cool to 45°C (115°F), then inoculate it with a starter. For starter, use one pouch of Yogourmet or a couple of teaspoons of yogourt per litre of milk, and whisk thoroughly or blend with a stick blender.Yogourt recipes often call for substantial amounts of yogourt as a start. This author actually tested it, and Sandor Katz read a paper on it. If you are using a heritage culture, experiment.

Incubate the inoculated milk in stainless steel or glass container at 45°C for four hours. Incubating yogourt for a longer time makes it more acid, not more firm. I like sharp yogourt, so I often make my yogourt at night and take it out of the warm oven in the morning.

Congratulations! You have made yogourt–just chill and enjoy. I use it most in smoothies, and as a sour cream substitute for perogies. I love to drink Lassi, with cardomom and rosewater. And labneh is seriously easy and wondrously delicious.

5 Comments

  1. Thanks for the thermometer link! I have been using a similar Polder thermometer that only alarms for rising temps, but even that alarm broke after only a few months of use. The thermometer part is still useful though, of course. I make a gallon at a time and only heat my milk to 180°F/82°C using the yogurt setting on my Instant Pot (with no burnt or stuck bits in the pot!) and get a nice, scoopable set for the yogurt. That could be the powdered Y5 culture (from New England Cheesemaking Supply), however, I suppose. Now I wonder if increasing the heat would make it even thicker. Thanks again, very happy to see your new posts!

    • I am glad you like the posts!

      You are just heating to 180, but not holding? I get great set if I use fresh Yogourmet every time—the loss of thickness becomes noticeable after a few batches of using old yogourt as the starter. I wonder if holding at 180 would allow you to recycle this Y5 culture…

      • Yes, I pull the pot at 180°F and do two changes of water in a water bath (large bowl) to drop it to 120°F, then into quart glass jars which cools it another 5-10°. I’ve never yet had good results with maintaining a mother culture myself (forget it/eat it/find it growing fuzz). Life gets in the way! I don’t enjoy making a whole gallon of yogurt to wind up with runny clumps. So, the powdered Y5 each time it is. You got me to pull out my Sandor book, at least, and enjoy all his opinions on yogurt again. (Milk by Anne Mendelson is also amazing, if you haven’t read it.)

  2. Oh boy. Seems a sabbatical was all he needed.

    I like yogurt, but not it seems as much as you. The Mrs. likes yogurt more than I, though still… likely just a smidge less than you. At any rate, it will not hurt me a tad to take a shine to the directions here and have a go at making my own.

    Now, if we struggle mightily we might link recent editorial content at the newly revived Smallanddeliciouslife and ponder various milk sources as starting points for yogurt manufacture.

    Rabbits – ok, yes, rabbits are mammals. The postpartum doe does produce milk. But as much as this is true, it comes into the vein of a tomato. Knowledge is realizing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not adding a tomato to fruit salad. And thus rabbit yogurt will get passed over.

    Cows – of course. But how sustainable are cows? Should they be grass fed or grain fed? Seaweed? What breed? None of the above?

    Sheep – see rabbits; and to the credit of both – they do seem to make less methane from their food than the cows. Actually, sheep do deserve a bit more attention. The Basque folk of Spain have milked sheep for centuries. And I can point the curious to an article on the: Carbon footprint of milk from sheep farming systems in Northern Spain [or Google the words in italics]

    Horses – I don’t recall horses getting a mention in the previous article here. My bad. Mare’s milk is a real thing. Rabbits might be jealous. I had the pleasure of sampling mare’s milk in the wilds of Kazakhstan. Perhaps pleasure overstates. But I did get to sample some. Can’t say I got to sample any yogurt made from mare’s milk. Again, my bad. Looking forward to a return trip to Kazakhstan so I can remedy this oversight. I’m supposing I’d prefer the yogurt.

    Goats – saved the best for last. So goats appear to be very efficient on the biogas emissions front. And we did get to this in the comments at the last article. Goat’s milk for yogurt… what do you say Mr. Anderson? A thousand years from now, if we haven’t burnt the planet to a crisp first… goat yogurt may be all the rage. Grass fed, methane neutral, goat milk. They might call it gogurt. Wait, someone already sells gogurt. Drat. 🙁

    • Ha-hah! The joke is on you, for I know all about goat yogourt. I grew up so big and strong because I was raised by goats, on goat—goat milk, goat cheese, and goat meat.

      It was a funny time when another son-of-hippies and I discovered we can both smell goat products at 40 paces—and don’t like them. It is a real shame, what with the goat cheese lovingly spooned onto every localist’s salad.

      I sure do like goats though; the cats of the hoofed world.

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