March 2022: Yogurt
Yogurt is not my favorite food in the world. I’ve used it when there is a recipe that calls for it, but it’s not something I enjoy as a snack or dessert. Except in 1984. That was the year I spent 3 weeks in France as an exchange student. The girl I was paired up with, Marie-Hélène, taught me to add sugar to the yogurt, and I couldn’t get enough of the stuff. Before then, I’d only had yogurt in the little single-use plastic cups with fruit added. Not so bad, but the yogurt with French sugar was a revelation. I’m not sure how their sugar is different, but it dissolved in the yogurt and made the most delicious confection. I ate it every chance I got, to the point that I sometimes came to the dinner table with no appetite at all. Dinners were several-course affairs, so it could get awkward trying to eat all that food. And man, I loved the food in that country. That trip was a difficult one for me because I was extremely immature and had trouble connecting with most of the other students (my experiences with social awkwardness could be an entirely different blog), but at least the food was good.
Paris, 1984
So yeah, yogurt. I needed to make it for some of my standard recipes, but it was a little daunting. A lot of diy yogurt recipes call for a yogurt maker, but I wasn’t willing to buy one (isn’t it enough that I’ve had to buy a spice grinder, a special pot just for baking bread, and a tortilla press?) (More on the tortilla press in a coming post…). But there were a number of recipes that promised good yogurt without a special machine. I focused on this one from National Public Radio (they can be trusted, right?). It’s pretty simple, you heat some whole milk to 180° F, let it cool to 115° F, then add some yogurt, mix it up and then keep it in a warm place overnight. I followed the recipe and ended up with a jar of milk with a tiny amount of yogurt on the bottom (the exact same yogurt that I used as my starter).
I tried again, this time trying to keep the yogurt warmer as it incubated overnight. I heated water in a microwave and then put the yogurt culture in the warm steamy microwave overnight. Something fermented because the resulting solution smelled and tasted like yogurt, but unfortunately it still had the consistency of milk.
“What is more important than success and failure is that you continue trying.”
— Pooja Agnihotri
Then I read in the Kitchen Stewardship blog that it can help to keep the yogurt at 180° F for a half hour before letting it cool. After making that modification, I put the yogurt culture in a warm space by our router (~ 70° F, nothing crazy) and let it go overnight. The next morning I had perfectly-set, delicious yogurt. Wanting to keep my culture going, I had to find a way to use more yogurt. I started with a yogurt tahini dressing, which was quite good, but then I found a solution that brought me back to France, with a New England twist. I added maple syrup to the yogurt for a surprisingly satisfying dessert. I often throw in some blueberries, and it makes for a healthy (well, sort of healthy… I sometimes overdo it on the maple syrup) nighttime snack. I’m very pleased!
[Note: This post was actually written in November, even though the events described took place in March. I am way, way behind on my posts and have used the Thanksgiving holiday to catch up on a year of writing. Hence, most of the subsequent posts will also be written in November.]