The Yogurt Report
Aug. 22nd, 2020 06:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
scrubjayspeaksOkay! As promised: yogurt report! Now with bonus maths!
The Stuff
Instant Pot Duo Evo Plus (anything with that many name modifiers must be good, right?)
Sprouts brand organic (whole) milk with vitamin D
Icelandic Provisions brand plain skyr
Mesh strainers
Cheesecloth
Old plastic containers with lids
A few notes on the supplies here: Sprouts is a local nicer grocery store chain I go to for all the stuff that needs to be Better Than The Cheap Shit. They're not as frou-frou as Whole Foods, and they tend to be smaller locations, but it's more in that vein than anything else. I got their brand of milk because the price was decent, and the vitamin D added one was the only whole milk they had available. I wanted whole milk for the added fat content--making this yogurt low-fat is very much the opposite of what I want. I went with organic out of a slightly irrational concern about the cultures surviving the fermentation process. I don't know if organic milk gives them a better chance or not. Leave me to my superstitions. I don't normally buy organic much of anything, because money.
Icelandic Provisions is one of two brands of skyr I love (the other being Siggi's). Skyr is a traditional Icelandic food and is, technically speaking, a type of cheese rather than a true yogurt, because it uses rennet. It's very thick, like, hold up a fencepost thick, which I enjoy immensely. I like those brands because they have minimal additional ingredients. Just the yogurt, cane sugar for sweetener, and fruit. But plain is what you need to use as a starter. Because I did not use rennet (uhhh...probably gonna source some eventually, at which point I'll probably also go down the rabbit hole of making my own cheeses or something, gods help me), what I made is not skyr. It's just what I used as the source for my Live and Active Cultures TM.
The Method
The first thing I will say, because the manual for the Instant Pot couldn't be arsed to spell it out, is that the pasteurizing segment of the yogurt program takes a whopping 3 minutes. All the recipes I read for making yogurt in Instant Pots described the pasteurizing as a thirty-minute process. Since one of them recommended running it twice for a thicker final product, I rightly thought that I was going to need an hour of intermittent attention before I could set it to ferment and ignore it. I would have timed my starting very differently had I known this. So! Information! If you select the yogurt program and tell it to start, it will say how long it's going to last, so you can check this for your own model if every other document lies to you like they did to me.
So I had a half-gallon of milk, dumped it all in the inner pot, put the lid on, and selected the yogurt program. I chose the pasteurize step and told it to start. Three minutes later, I had some steaming hot milk. Ran it again for good measure.
Next up, you have to cool the milk enough that it won't kill the cultures on contact--just under 110 degrees F. I elected to fill my kitchen sink up with a few inches of cool tap water and set the inner pot in that to cool it faster. I gave it the occasional stir to make it cool evenly. That got it down from the 180 degrees it had been at (I think, somewhere between 160 and 180, anyway) to 108 in something like ten minutes. Faster than I had been led to expect. (This whole cooking process was an exercise in food authorities lying to me like bastard-flavored bastards and me persevering despite them.)
I ladled out about a half a cup of this warm milk into a small dish and added two tablespoons of my plain skyr as starter. Mixed until blended, then dumped that mess back into the rest of the milk in the inner pot. After drying the outside of the pot, I returned it to the Instant Pot base. Selected yogurt again, moved on to the ferment stage, and set it for eight hours. Eight hours is the basic time frame, and since I didn't know how this would go, I went with that. More on this later.
I then ignored the heck out of the whole thing for eight hours.
Now this is where I've gotten some contradictory messages for the approximately eight thousand cooking sites I visited. I'm going to tell you what I did and why, though of course, I've only made the one batch and can't say if these were the "right" decisions. Supposedly, sudden temperature changes can cause the yogurt to go thin. And since I want all of the thickness at all costs, I let the yogurt cool on the countertop for several hours before refrigerating it. Did I need to leave it out that long? Was that a good idea? Probably not, but since the fridge was too full of casserole dishes until after we ate dinner, yogurt had to wait its goddamn turn.
I also did not stir it before letting it set up in the fridge, as doing so can possibly also inflict thin yogurt on you. I just covered the pot in plastic wrap and chucked it in the fridge overnight. I did tap it with a finger to be completely certain it really was yogurt and not, as I had secretly feared, just a pan of slightly warm, possibly toxic milk. It was sort of...pudding-like, firm enough to not dimple from that light touch but obviously silky underneath.
Next morning! I gave it a vigorous stir and found...the yogurt is kind of thin after all. To be fair, it's at least as thick as normal plain yogurt when stirred. It's just nowhere near the skyr level of spackle texture I would like to achieve. I ladled it into two 32 oz plastic containers, mostly to know how much I had gotten. More on that later as well.
Then my dissatisfaction got the best of me and I decided to strain it. I set mesh strainers over a couple large mixing bowls and lined them with pieces of cheesecloth. I'll tell you right now, my secret cheapskate streak once again screwed me over, because I cut the pieces smaller than I should have and ended up with threads of it in my yogurt. It's fine, I pushed everything through the strainers at the end to get them out. But don't be me--use a proper size of cheesecloth. I let them strain for three hours, which had to be done in two batches to avoid overflowing the strainers.
The end result (oh god, this is the longest I've ever talked about yogurt and I'm nowhere close to done) was slightly thicker. Realistically, I think I would need to strain it overnight to really get the thickness I want. I'm not currently that patient, but I can do it that way for the next batch. The other benefit of straining, though, was that it made it very smooth. The fermenting process had left a film of cooked-on milk solids at the bottom of the pan and straining took some of that out.
The Results
But how does it taste? Well, in a word, good? It's...I'm not sure what I expected. Either staggering triumph or crushing defeat. But really, it just made a perfectly nice batch of ordinary plain yogurt. The flavor is mildly tangy, with a distinctly creamy milk taste to it that I think is missing from a lot of mass-produced yogurts. I tried it with a bit of lemon curd mixed in, which is my preferred way to eat plain skyr, and I was surprised to find that too sweet. This yogurt just doesn't have the same intense tang, so it doesn't need the added sweetness. I had some later with sliced peaches and a bit of vanilla almond granola and it was quite lovely. I've got lots of it, so I'll be trying it several different ways. It can supposedly keep for a couple weeks, though I don't expect it to go uneaten for that long.
Straining left me with quite a bit of whey, which I didn't really want to just toss out. It can apparently be added to smoothies and such, but I don't really drink smoothies that much. It can, however, be used as a brine for meats. So it's going on the next batch of chicken breasts I cook.
What would I do differently next time?
Definitely a longer ferment time. Twelve hours, probably. I want that tang. And I would plan on straining it from the start and letting it go overnight for maximum thickness. That means, in theory, I could pasteurize it at six in the morning, have it finish fermenting by six in the evening, cool for an hour, and set it up to strain overnight. (This can apparently be done unrefrigerated, because the acidity will keep any bad microorganisms from getting a foothold, but if I strain it in the fridge, I don't have to chill it later before I can eat it.) That gives me strained, chilled yogurt in 24 hours, which is a pretty good pace.
I'd like to experiment with the milk options. I'm not sure I can bring myself to buy the raw milk I saw, which was a staggering $15 for a half-gallon. The mind cannot encompass that price tag. But I'd like to see what I can get of grass-fed milks and such to get the best possible flavor base. Also, possibly goat milk at some point.
The Maths!
Because of course I did an unreasonably specific breakdown on the cost effectiveness of this. Now this is going to use the base prices of the milk and yogurt from the stores I buy it in, not factoring in any sales. Because I only have so much of my life to dedicate to yogurt-based math problems.
I will point out that I do not buy organic yogurt normally, but I did just make an almost-organic batch of it (milk is organic, starter skyr is not). That's a bit apples-and-oranges of me. Buying the cheap shit for milk could cut the cost in half or so, but...well, then I'm probably going to make yogurt that tastes of cheap shit.
The interesting thing I will point out is that, before I did any straining, I had basically 64 oz of yogurt--two full 32 oz containers. That's the same number of ounces in a half-gallon of milk. So the heating process didn't cause any real loss of volume to evaporation. I had been expecting to lose a lot more volume than that for some reason.
So the organic milk cost 6.7 cents per ounce, which will also be the cost of the basic yogurt it makes. I'm not factoring in the cost of the two tablespoons of starter, because it's going to be such a fiddling amount. ...Okay, fine, that's one ounce of starter, which costs approximately 45.2 cents per oz. Divided across 64 oz of yogurt made, and the starter will add 0.7 of a cent per ounce of yogurt. So I guess we can round the cost of the resulting yogurt up to 7.4 cents per ounce. Cool.
For comparison, again, the skyr I like to buy is 45.2 cents an ounce. That's six times more expensive. But that's a much thicker (and possibly better, but let's not judge my first attempt TOO harshly) yogurt. I would need to strain mine a lot to get a comparable texture and concentration of yogurt. Straining just lightly pulled out about 10 oz of whey for each 32 oz of yogurt strained. I can factor that in as a loss as well. That bumps the cost of my yogurt, including one ounce of starter, to 10.7 cents. That's still a massive cut in cost compared to the store-bought skyr. Even if I stuck with organic milk, strained it extensively, and maybe even added the expense of using rennet in the future, I suspect I would come out ahead on cost regardless.
A fairer comparison would be to a traditional-style plain yogurt--ordinary thickness, unflavored. As it so happens, I have the cost of that as well--11.8 cents per ounce. (That's what used to be in the 32 oz containers I stored my yogurt in.) Which means my unstrained yogurt, with much the same level of thickness, is about 1.5 times cheaper than what I can buy in the store. While not as stark a contrast, that's still damn good, for an amount of added effort that is well within my capacity.
(If anyone suggests I need to factor in energy usage on the Instant Pot, I will invite them to a) kick rocks and b) do the research on that their own damn selves.)
While this wasn't exactly an experiment in cost-cutting, I still find this interesting. "Make it at home" food advice can come in a few flavors, if you will. Sometimes, it's done to cut costs. Sometimes, it's done to improve flavor or other qualities. Sometimes, it's done to avoid certain commercial ingredients, independent of or in addition to the general food quality. You can't always get all in the same method, though. Made from scratch food might be far less expensive, but it may have imperfect flavor or texture compared to commercially available versions. Tasty and/or additive-free versions can become much more expensive, depending on the ingredients and methods required. (All of this ignores the issue of having the time, energy, and skills needed to make something from scratch at home, but that's a discussion for another day.)
When I make weird foods at home, sometimes it's just a lark. I want to make the thing because I want to see if I can. Or I want to make it because I don't have a source for buying it for whatever reason. In those instances, I don't care about the cost of the thing. I'm not planning to make it as a staple. Yogurt, though, is something I eat on a nearly daily basis. Sometimes I eat it multiple times a day. It's a major staple of my diet.
(This, incidentally, only became the case after I tried the skyr-style products. Before that, I had gone off yogurt almost entirely, except for sometimes using plain yogurt as a baking ingredient. The flavored brands available were such garbage, tasting almost exclusively of artificial sweeteners, that I abandoned any hope of enjoying yogurt on its own.)
So yes, I'm interested in the economic value of this food experiment, in addition to the taste and entertainment factors. It was fun to make it, satisfying. The taste and texture issues are only something to tackle with further experimentation, not deterrents. And the fact that it's cheaper than what I've been buying en mass at the grocery store, and will likely remain cheaper almost regardless of any changes I might make to methods and ingredients, means that I have good reason to keep playing with this particular novelty.
Also, I made masoor dal in the Instant Pot after the yogurt finished, and mum made naan, so I'm going to have all that with some homemade yogurt on top. And that's pretty much all I want from my culinary life, so I'm feeling pretty good all around.
The Stuff
Instant Pot Duo Evo Plus (anything with that many name modifiers must be good, right?)
Sprouts brand organic (whole) milk with vitamin D
Icelandic Provisions brand plain skyr
Mesh strainers
Cheesecloth
Old plastic containers with lids
A few notes on the supplies here: Sprouts is a local nicer grocery store chain I go to for all the stuff that needs to be Better Than The Cheap Shit. They're not as frou-frou as Whole Foods, and they tend to be smaller locations, but it's more in that vein than anything else. I got their brand of milk because the price was decent, and the vitamin D added one was the only whole milk they had available. I wanted whole milk for the added fat content--making this yogurt low-fat is very much the opposite of what I want. I went with organic out of a slightly irrational concern about the cultures surviving the fermentation process. I don't know if organic milk gives them a better chance or not. Leave me to my superstitions. I don't normally buy organic much of anything, because money.
Icelandic Provisions is one of two brands of skyr I love (the other being Siggi's). Skyr is a traditional Icelandic food and is, technically speaking, a type of cheese rather than a true yogurt, because it uses rennet. It's very thick, like, hold up a fencepost thick, which I enjoy immensely. I like those brands because they have minimal additional ingredients. Just the yogurt, cane sugar for sweetener, and fruit. But plain is what you need to use as a starter. Because I did not use rennet (uhhh...probably gonna source some eventually, at which point I'll probably also go down the rabbit hole of making my own cheeses or something, gods help me), what I made is not skyr. It's just what I used as the source for my Live and Active Cultures TM.
The Method
The first thing I will say, because the manual for the Instant Pot couldn't be arsed to spell it out, is that the pasteurizing segment of the yogurt program takes a whopping 3 minutes. All the recipes I read for making yogurt in Instant Pots described the pasteurizing as a thirty-minute process. Since one of them recommended running it twice for a thicker final product, I rightly thought that I was going to need an hour of intermittent attention before I could set it to ferment and ignore it. I would have timed my starting very differently had I known this. So! Information! If you select the yogurt program and tell it to start, it will say how long it's going to last, so you can check this for your own model if every other document lies to you like they did to me.
So I had a half-gallon of milk, dumped it all in the inner pot, put the lid on, and selected the yogurt program. I chose the pasteurize step and told it to start. Three minutes later, I had some steaming hot milk. Ran it again for good measure.
Next up, you have to cool the milk enough that it won't kill the cultures on contact--just under 110 degrees F. I elected to fill my kitchen sink up with a few inches of cool tap water and set the inner pot in that to cool it faster. I gave it the occasional stir to make it cool evenly. That got it down from the 180 degrees it had been at (I think, somewhere between 160 and 180, anyway) to 108 in something like ten minutes. Faster than I had been led to expect. (This whole cooking process was an exercise in food authorities lying to me like bastard-flavored bastards and me persevering despite them.)
I ladled out about a half a cup of this warm milk into a small dish and added two tablespoons of my plain skyr as starter. Mixed until blended, then dumped that mess back into the rest of the milk in the inner pot. After drying the outside of the pot, I returned it to the Instant Pot base. Selected yogurt again, moved on to the ferment stage, and set it for eight hours. Eight hours is the basic time frame, and since I didn't know how this would go, I went with that. More on this later.
I then ignored the heck out of the whole thing for eight hours.
Now this is where I've gotten some contradictory messages for the approximately eight thousand cooking sites I visited. I'm going to tell you what I did and why, though of course, I've only made the one batch and can't say if these were the "right" decisions. Supposedly, sudden temperature changes can cause the yogurt to go thin. And since I want all of the thickness at all costs, I let the yogurt cool on the countertop for several hours before refrigerating it. Did I need to leave it out that long? Was that a good idea? Probably not, but since the fridge was too full of casserole dishes until after we ate dinner, yogurt had to wait its goddamn turn.
I also did not stir it before letting it set up in the fridge, as doing so can possibly also inflict thin yogurt on you. I just covered the pot in plastic wrap and chucked it in the fridge overnight. I did tap it with a finger to be completely certain it really was yogurt and not, as I had secretly feared, just a pan of slightly warm, possibly toxic milk. It was sort of...pudding-like, firm enough to not dimple from that light touch but obviously silky underneath.
Next morning! I gave it a vigorous stir and found...the yogurt is kind of thin after all. To be fair, it's at least as thick as normal plain yogurt when stirred. It's just nowhere near the skyr level of spackle texture I would like to achieve. I ladled it into two 32 oz plastic containers, mostly to know how much I had gotten. More on that later as well.
Then my dissatisfaction got the best of me and I decided to strain it. I set mesh strainers over a couple large mixing bowls and lined them with pieces of cheesecloth. I'll tell you right now, my secret cheapskate streak once again screwed me over, because I cut the pieces smaller than I should have and ended up with threads of it in my yogurt. It's fine, I pushed everything through the strainers at the end to get them out. But don't be me--use a proper size of cheesecloth. I let them strain for three hours, which had to be done in two batches to avoid overflowing the strainers.
The end result (oh god, this is the longest I've ever talked about yogurt and I'm nowhere close to done) was slightly thicker. Realistically, I think I would need to strain it overnight to really get the thickness I want. I'm not currently that patient, but I can do it that way for the next batch. The other benefit of straining, though, was that it made it very smooth. The fermenting process had left a film of cooked-on milk solids at the bottom of the pan and straining took some of that out.
The Results
But how does it taste? Well, in a word, good? It's...I'm not sure what I expected. Either staggering triumph or crushing defeat. But really, it just made a perfectly nice batch of ordinary plain yogurt. The flavor is mildly tangy, with a distinctly creamy milk taste to it that I think is missing from a lot of mass-produced yogurts. I tried it with a bit of lemon curd mixed in, which is my preferred way to eat plain skyr, and I was surprised to find that too sweet. This yogurt just doesn't have the same intense tang, so it doesn't need the added sweetness. I had some later with sliced peaches and a bit of vanilla almond granola and it was quite lovely. I've got lots of it, so I'll be trying it several different ways. It can supposedly keep for a couple weeks, though I don't expect it to go uneaten for that long.
Straining left me with quite a bit of whey, which I didn't really want to just toss out. It can apparently be added to smoothies and such, but I don't really drink smoothies that much. It can, however, be used as a brine for meats. So it's going on the next batch of chicken breasts I cook.
What would I do differently next time?
Definitely a longer ferment time. Twelve hours, probably. I want that tang. And I would plan on straining it from the start and letting it go overnight for maximum thickness. That means, in theory, I could pasteurize it at six in the morning, have it finish fermenting by six in the evening, cool for an hour, and set it up to strain overnight. (This can apparently be done unrefrigerated, because the acidity will keep any bad microorganisms from getting a foothold, but if I strain it in the fridge, I don't have to chill it later before I can eat it.) That gives me strained, chilled yogurt in 24 hours, which is a pretty good pace.
I'd like to experiment with the milk options. I'm not sure I can bring myself to buy the raw milk I saw, which was a staggering $15 for a half-gallon. The mind cannot encompass that price tag. But I'd like to see what I can get of grass-fed milks and such to get the best possible flavor base. Also, possibly goat milk at some point.
The Maths!
Because of course I did an unreasonably specific breakdown on the cost effectiveness of this. Now this is going to use the base prices of the milk and yogurt from the stores I buy it in, not factoring in any sales. Because I only have so much of my life to dedicate to yogurt-based math problems.
I will point out that I do not buy organic yogurt normally, but I did just make an almost-organic batch of it (milk is organic, starter skyr is not). That's a bit apples-and-oranges of me. Buying the cheap shit for milk could cut the cost in half or so, but...well, then I'm probably going to make yogurt that tastes of cheap shit.
The interesting thing I will point out is that, before I did any straining, I had basically 64 oz of yogurt--two full 32 oz containers. That's the same number of ounces in a half-gallon of milk. So the heating process didn't cause any real loss of volume to evaporation. I had been expecting to lose a lot more volume than that for some reason.
So the organic milk cost 6.7 cents per ounce, which will also be the cost of the basic yogurt it makes. I'm not factoring in the cost of the two tablespoons of starter, because it's going to be such a fiddling amount. ...Okay, fine, that's one ounce of starter, which costs approximately 45.2 cents per oz. Divided across 64 oz of yogurt made, and the starter will add 0.7 of a cent per ounce of yogurt. So I guess we can round the cost of the resulting yogurt up to 7.4 cents per ounce. Cool.
For comparison, again, the skyr I like to buy is 45.2 cents an ounce. That's six times more expensive. But that's a much thicker (and possibly better, but let's not judge my first attempt TOO harshly) yogurt. I would need to strain mine a lot to get a comparable texture and concentration of yogurt. Straining just lightly pulled out about 10 oz of whey for each 32 oz of yogurt strained. I can factor that in as a loss as well. That bumps the cost of my yogurt, including one ounce of starter, to 10.7 cents. That's still a massive cut in cost compared to the store-bought skyr. Even if I stuck with organic milk, strained it extensively, and maybe even added the expense of using rennet in the future, I suspect I would come out ahead on cost regardless.
A fairer comparison would be to a traditional-style plain yogurt--ordinary thickness, unflavored. As it so happens, I have the cost of that as well--11.8 cents per ounce. (That's what used to be in the 32 oz containers I stored my yogurt in.) Which means my unstrained yogurt, with much the same level of thickness, is about 1.5 times cheaper than what I can buy in the store. While not as stark a contrast, that's still damn good, for an amount of added effort that is well within my capacity.
(If anyone suggests I need to factor in energy usage on the Instant Pot, I will invite them to a) kick rocks and b) do the research on that their own damn selves.)
While this wasn't exactly an experiment in cost-cutting, I still find this interesting. "Make it at home" food advice can come in a few flavors, if you will. Sometimes, it's done to cut costs. Sometimes, it's done to improve flavor or other qualities. Sometimes, it's done to avoid certain commercial ingredients, independent of or in addition to the general food quality. You can't always get all in the same method, though. Made from scratch food might be far less expensive, but it may have imperfect flavor or texture compared to commercially available versions. Tasty and/or additive-free versions can become much more expensive, depending on the ingredients and methods required. (All of this ignores the issue of having the time, energy, and skills needed to make something from scratch at home, but that's a discussion for another day.)
When I make weird foods at home, sometimes it's just a lark. I want to make the thing because I want to see if I can. Or I want to make it because I don't have a source for buying it for whatever reason. In those instances, I don't care about the cost of the thing. I'm not planning to make it as a staple. Yogurt, though, is something I eat on a nearly daily basis. Sometimes I eat it multiple times a day. It's a major staple of my diet.
(This, incidentally, only became the case after I tried the skyr-style products. Before that, I had gone off yogurt almost entirely, except for sometimes using plain yogurt as a baking ingredient. The flavored brands available were such garbage, tasting almost exclusively of artificial sweeteners, that I abandoned any hope of enjoying yogurt on its own.)
So yes, I'm interested in the economic value of this food experiment, in addition to the taste and entertainment factors. It was fun to make it, satisfying. The taste and texture issues are only something to tackle with further experimentation, not deterrents. And the fact that it's cheaper than what I've been buying en mass at the grocery store, and will likely remain cheaper almost regardless of any changes I might make to methods and ingredients, means that I have good reason to keep playing with this particular novelty.
Also, I made masoor dal in the Instant Pot after the yogurt finished, and mum made naan, so I'm going to have all that with some homemade yogurt on top. And that's pretty much all I want from my culinary life, so I'm feeling pretty good all around.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-24 03:49 am (UTC)