Making Yoghurt: part one

I have a new toy. It’s called ‘The New Complete Book of Sustainable Living’. It contains many wonderful things, with sections on how to build your own cowshed, what to look for in a healthy pig, how to spin flax, etc etc. One of the many wonderful things is a nice large chapter on making your own dairy products. This looked good, I thought, for households like ours which inexplicably manage periodically to accumulate a vast milk surplus despite a) getting the same amount of milk each week and b) not having a cow. I quickly skipped over all the stuff about making cheese, since there is no way that a cheese press and four gallon copper pot will fit into our kitchen (although for the interested, there are instructions on how to build your own cheese press at http://fiascofarm.com/dairy/cheesepress.html). Yoghurt, on the other hand, sounded more promising.

My first investigations into the world of home-made yoghurt were marred by the fact that the author of this book, along with many writers, assumes that you have somewhere where the yoghurt-in-process can be kept warm at a constant temperature for about twelve hours. I suppose this could be done in an Aga or airing cupboard, but we don’t have either of those. In fact, I think an Aga might actually be larger than our entire kitchen. Thanks to the internet, however, I discovered that some very clever people have realised that a normal thermos flask will keep milk warm just as well as an Aga. All you have to do, I learned, is to sterilise a thermos with boiling water, boil some milk, let it cool down a bit, add two tablespoons of live yoghurt, and leave the whole lot in the thermos overnight. Easy!

Anyway, the results weren’t half bad. The yoghurt hadn’t thickened as much as I’d hoped but it was definitely yoghurt. It rather reminded me of the kind of pouring yoghurt or keffir that you get everywhere in Scandinavia and which I used to put on my muesli when I lived in Norway. That suits me fine, since I greatly miss the wide range of tasty dairy products peculiar to Scandinavia and would be delighted if I could make my own. Still, I would like to make a thicker yoghurt, and maybe add some fruit or honey. I’ll have another go once I’ve drunk this batch.