Tips on making yogurt:

A strawberry yogurt drink
Photo by Dirk Schneider

The Mongol warriors brought yogurt to the west when they conquered Eastern Europe hundreds of years ago.  They used it as a ration for their army and usually kept it in a waterproof leather bag attached to their saddle.  It was made originally made from mare’s or yak milk and was similar to koumiss a mildly intoxicating beverage the Mongol’s used to get drunk with.

In reality, yogurt is a simple cheese that one should master the making of before they try to make more complicated cheeses.  It will teach you how to use milk in quantities, how to keep your utensils sterile, and what to do with it after it is made.

The first thing you have to do is sterilize the lids and jars you are going to make the yogurt in.  You do this by placing them into a pot large enough to hold them.  Cover them with an inch of water, put a cover on the pot and bring it to a boil for ten minutes.

Use a thick bottomed pot or a double boiler put one gallon of milk and raise the temperature of the milk until it is scalded, but you don’t have to boil the milk as this could cause the milk to stick to the bottom of the pot, or boil over.

Raise the temperature of the milk over a medium fire so it doesn’t get hot enough to stick to the bottom of a thick bottomed pot.  Use a fireproof pad under the pot if necessary if the bottom of the pot isn’t thick enough.  The ideal temperature is between 85 to 90 degrees Celsius or 185 – 195 degrees F.

Put the pot full of hot milk into a pan full of cold water and allow it to cool down to 50 to 55 degrees C or 120 to 130 degrees F.  Then remove it from the pan of cold water and set aside.

Put a cup of milk into a two cup measuring device and add enough uncontaminated yogurt to bring the contents up to the full two cups measure.  The yogurt you use should be unflavored that you can buy at a local supermarket.  Try the different brands until you find one that works best.  Blend the milk and yogurt until they are thoroughly blended.

Now you add the mixture in the two cup container to the rest of the milk that has cooled to 50 degrees C, 122 degrees F while stirring.  Don’t allow the milk to become any warmer then 50 degrees C or you will kill the bacteria in the mixture.

Place the mixture into the sterilized containers by filling to the neck and put the lids on so they are tight.  You will still have to allow the yogurt to incubate for yogurt.  You can do this by placing in a container full of water that has been warmed to 50 degrees C or 122 degrees F any warmer you will kill the bacteria.  Set the cooler aside for around three hours and if you did everything right the yogurt will have turned to a jelly like consistency in its containers.  It’s now ready too eat!

You can use a picnic cooler for incubating your yogurt in because it is insulated, and will hold the temperature of the cooling bath while the yogurt is incubating.  After it is removed from the cooler it has to be kept in the refrigerator until used.

Yogurt can be flavored and sweetened to taste before you add the two cups of starter to the pan of cooling milk.   

Making Cheese Starters:

Cheese
Photo by Alex Anlicker

In order to make any cheese you need the proper starters.  These are natural milk bacteria that eat the lactose in the milk and produce lactic acid that curdles the cheese and gives each one its distinctive flavor. 

Otto Bismarck the 19^th century chancellor of Germany one remarked that there were two processes that people should not watch, the making of sausage, and the passing of laws.  He might just as well have included cheese making in his diatribe.  To make cheese you have to have bacteria and mold too they give the cheese its character and flavor.

A cheese culture is made of milk, butter milk actually that has been inoculated with the proper bacteria from a specific cheese that will impart its flavor to the cheese you want to make.  This imparts lactic acid that will curdle the milk you are going to make into cheese.

There are good germs, and bad germs any human body contains several trillion different germs that supply many of our necessary life functions.  So it is with the bacteria and mold that forms cheese.  No matter what cheese you want to produce you must start with a cheese starter.

Cheese making has been around for a long while as an ancient practice with many different kinds of cheese recognized and handed down from the past.  Before the days of modern science duplicating cheeses was hit or miss at best.  Today some of the uncertainties have been taken out of cheesemaking, but not all there are still surprises.  Most batches of cheese work well however, every once in a while a batch can go bad.

One of the biggest problems facing the old time cheesemakers was their little choice of the proper starter cultures.  When they made a good batch of cheese they kept some of the whey overnight to use in the next day’s production.  Usually this worked as the bacteria in the whey multiplied and was ready to go to work the following day.  However if some “Wild Bacteria” got into the whey it could more then likely change whatever was produced the following day with disastrous results.  Making cheese in the old times was by chance more then by art.

In modern practice however steps have been taken to remove the factor of chance from the process as much as possible, but cheesemaking is still an art even though much of the chance has been removed.  One of the processes that has removed some of this chance is the pasteurizing the milk to kill the bacteria found there.  In effect this leaves you with a blank slate to work with.  This blank slate is open to any bacteria that comes along whether it is good or bad.

The other process is the availability of commercially available “cheesemaking cultures” that are added to the pasteurized milk to start the cheesemaking process.  This is done by adding the starter culture, the rennet if the recipe calls for its use, and the mold to ripen the cheese.

Unpastuerized milk actually holds the necessary bacteria to make cheese, but if the lactic acid these bacteria exceeds the amount needed to make a specific cheese the results will be a crumbly cheese.  If there isn’t enough lactic acid it will produce a cheese that has a pasty texture.  Proper quantities of lactic acid in your cheese will also help to drive the whey from the curds.  This is a crucial step in the cheesemaking process except cheeses that are soft or unripened like cottage cheese.  The formation of lactic acid aside from helping in the curdling of the milk also helps in keeping dangerous bacteria out of the cheese.

Basically there are two different types of cultures available for use, they are:

Mesophilic startersthat work at moderate temperatures whenever the curds will be warmed to a temperature no greater then 102 degrees Fahrenheit.  These cheeses include some of our favorite cheeses like Cheddar and Gouda.

The other type of starter is Thermophilic that are heat loving cultures where the curds are heated to a temperature not to exceed 132 degrees Fahrenheit for making various Swiss and Italian cheeses.

Each basic type of starter has several subspecies one of them is designed to be used with goat milk cheese only.  This is one of the mesophilic starters.  If you are making cheese at home you can culture this using a small piece of your favorite cheese placed into buttermilk as a culture.  This is kept in a refrigerator when not being used.  You should inoculate another batch of butter milk that has been pasteurized every week.  In this way you can keep a cheese culture alive for generations much like a sour bread starter.

The thermophilic starter is cultured the same way except this time it is cultured in unflavored yogurt.  The life of this starter can be extended for generations by inoculating a fresh batch of yogurt once a week.

If in doubt you can purchase cheese starters from several sources by Googling “Cheese Starters.”

References:

Cheese Making, http://schmidling.com/making.htm

Fankhauser’s Cheese Page, http://biology.clc.uc.edu/Fankhauser/Cheese/cheese.html