Make the Bread, Buy the Butter - Jennifer Reese [21]
4. The next day, you will have about a half gallon of yogurt. If you like runny yogurt, you’re done, but if you prefer thick Greek-style yogurt, you’ll need to drain it. Put a piece of cheesecloth or white cotton, such as a clean old pillowcase, in a sieve set up over a bowl. Scoop the yogurt into the sieve and drain for a few hours at room temperature until the yogurt is as thick as you like it. Depending on the fat content of the milk and how long you let it drain, you’ll have between a quart and a quart and a half of yogurt. (Don’t discard the whey, which you can store in a jar in the refrigerator for up to 10 days and use instead of water in bread and bagels.) Scoop the yogurt into a jar, cover tightly, and refrigerate. It will keep a week or so.
Makes 1 to 2 quarts
SOYY OGURT
Homemade soy yogurt is quavery and faintly sweet—like a delicate pudding. It is more temperamental than dairy yogurt, so you’ll want to experiment with brands of soy milk and cultures. I’ve had the best luck using Silk and yogurt cultures from New England Cheesemaking Supply (see Appendix).
Make it or buy it? Make it.
Hassle: Minimal
Cost comparison: Homemade: $4.00. Store-bought: $6.50.
To culture soy yogurt, follow the directions above for dairy yogurt, but instead of cow’s or goat’s milk, use a half gallon of supermarket soy milk. Replace the starter yogurt with a packet of powdered yogurt cultures. You can find these at some supermarkets and co-ops, or order them from a cheesemaking supply company (see Appendix).
The only hitch with my yogurt making is that my children eat only what Greg Malouf and Lucy Malouf in their cookbook Artichoke to Za’atar dismiss as “a gloppy, gelatinous substance, usually sweetened beyond belief.” In other words, Yoplait. A lot of people don’t approve of flavored yogurt, and I can see their point, but it is nonetheless a staple in many American households, including mine. It contains sugar but also protein and calcium, and as a portable snack for children, it could be much worse.
That said, after I started making yogurt I got carried away with yogurt mystique, and wanted my children to partake in its ancient, probiotic, homemade goodness. I was making this amazing stuff and they were taking plastic containers of key lime pie yogurt to school. How to replicate the sweetness and portability of Yoplait? The portability was the biggest problem. Perhaps now as I look back on it, the only problem. One day I sent Owen to school with a small canning jar that contained an inch of strawberry jam topped by homemade yogurt, an attempt to replicate “fruit at the bottom.” I explained to him that the jar was reusable and we were therefore making a proper ecological choice. He is ordinarily a patsy for any green argument, but he came home after school, the yogurt barely touched. “It’s not flavory enough,” he said.
I sent him the next day with more jam in the yogurt, and the jar came back full again.
“I wasn’t that hungry,” he said.
I tried lemon the next day, using lemon curd, since lemon is his favorite yogurt flavor.
Again, the jar returned untouched. I thought about this. I thought that perhaps it is embarrassing for a fourth-grade boy to extract a canning jar from a Transformers lunch box at the picnic tables of a public elementary school. Perhaps this is the twenty-first-century equivalent of sending a child off to the one-room schoolhouse in a flour-sack dress with a lard sandwich in her lunch pail. I retired the canning jar.
However, if you’re eating at home or don’t mind the canning jar, homemade lemon yogurt is terrific—much better than Yoplait.
LEMON YOGURT
Make it or buy it? Make it.
Hassle: None, once you have the lemon curd
Cost comparison: Homemade: $0.49 per ¾-cup serving. Yoplait “lemon burst”: $0.90.
1 tablespoon lemon curd (recipe follows)
Squeeze of lemon juice or ½ teaspoon water
¾ cup plain yogurt
Thin the curd with the lemon juice or water. Stir