Making a Yogurt Culture
My yogurt making skills have a lot to be desired, I’ve only tried it a couple of times and I did not drain the whey.
I had originally tried making my own when I first got my Instant Pot, because that’s what you do when you buy a new machine that has a yogurt button! Of course I just tried the very first recipe that I found and didn’t look back. I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. I successfully made a batch of yogurt with an entire gallon of milk, it was okay but nothing to get excited about. Nobody else in the house would eat it and I ended up throwing out a lot of yogurt and decided maybe that was one skill I didn’t need to have.
Fast forward a couple years later when I start making my own ricotta cheese for lasagna. This is when I learn about draining the whey. So of course I had questions about whey and dove into baking with whey in place of water. There is so much you can do! I don’t make ricotta often so how else would I get whey? (Insert lightbulb moment sound here) yogurt!
To make yogurt you need a starter culture, like the sourdough we keep in the fridge. There are different ways you can go about it.
Buy some plain yogurt at the store.
Pro: It’s ready to go, literally open the container and you have a start
Con: It’s processed food and I am going away from processed food. The yogurt you buy in the store has a ton of extra sugar added so that it can be good long enough to get from the factory, to the store shelf, to your refrigerator and still have a week for you to eat it. The small amount you use to make an entire new batch of yogurt is so small that I’m sure it doesn’t matter - but still it goes against what I’m trying to do.
Pro: It takes little preparation to activate and you can keep the starters in your dry pantry and don’t have to worry about keeping a yogurt start alive.
Con: You can’t use the yogurt made from the powder as a seed for your next batch. The powder offers one time use. I suppose this doesn’t matter if you don’t make yogurt often and just want to do it once in a while
Make a live yogurt culture from scratch and keep it alive like the soughdough
Pro: No sign of processed food here. If you already have a sough dough start, or a ginger bug (or both) you can easily add a yogurt start to the family. Keep making yogurt with a seed from each batch.
Con: It takes time, 24 hours to make the original start. Then the first batch of yogurt is scratch. THEN you have a yogurt culture that has to be used or fed weekly or it will die and you’ll have to start over.
Well, now I’m intrigued. My first reaction was to buy the powder starters with the idea that I can stock my dry pantry next the rennet and just make yogurt when I want to. But the more I thought about buying another processed product I started to explore making it myself. First I found this recipe at CookingADream.com I found it very interesting, but I learned my lesson about running with the first recipe I found. So I read more blogs, watched several YouTube videos and settled on this.
Click on the picture to get the printable version
24 hours after you start the culture, move on to step 2 here Edited note after the initial 24 hours of my test subjects, they had not thickened very much. I determined it was because they were not warm enough where they were ( probably my fault for trying this in the middle of winter) So I left one on the shelf to set for another 24 hours and I incubated one in my dehydrator/air fryer for four hours at 90 degrees. After 4 hours it had thickened to the consistency that I had expected. So warmth is the key.
