Greek Yogurt Problems

Someone left an anonymous comment on How to Make Greek Yogurt.

Anonymous said...

My husband has been making me yogurt, and smoothies from it, for years. During my year of cancer treatment, there were times it was all I could manage.I have a recent problem, though, and hoping someone can help. I recently had some Greek yogurt from a store, and he tried to make a batch of homemade using the Fage. Everything else was the same, but it didn't "yog," as we say. Any suggestions ?I also wonder if there's a strict definition of Greek yogurt. I've read that they strain out the whey, but I've done that with my yogurt, and it doesn't have the same mouth-feel. Unfortunately, there seems to be a lack of info on the labels, so I'm left wondering about things like "what animal did this milk come from - cow, sheep, goat ?"Any info welcome.

Anonymous - if your yogurt didn't "yog" there are several possible causes which I outline in the article. Maybe your milk was too hot when you added the starter, or maybe it wasn't warm enough, or perhaps you didn't leave it long enough. But if you are an experienced "yogger" it is more likely that your starter culture wasn't live, or active enough, to get your milk going. You said you used Fage - they manufacture Total Greek Yogurt, the most popular Greek yogurt in the UK. I found several answers to your questions from their website. It says:

TOTAL Greek Yoghurt is made from fresh cows’ milk, cream and live active yoghurt culture

So if you used Total yogurt then you can rule out sheeps' milk etc. Do you use full fat, semi-skimmed or skimmed milk for your home yogurt making? They can all be used, but it makes a lot of difference to the finished product. You might also try adding some cream to your milk to try to replicate the Total mouth-feel. And finally you could play around with the exact amount of straining to get the result you prefer. If you don't strain long enough your yogurt will be rather thinner than if you strained for longer. Strain too long and you're on your way you a sort of cream cheese, which might not be to your taste. I like to strain my yogurt through muslin for around 2 hours.

The website also says:

TOTAL Greek Yoghurt is made with live active cultures.

That means it can be used as a yogurt starter. But still, the starter could have been the cause of your yogging failure if it wasn't fresh enough. I always get the best results with spanking fresh yogurt (read the "best before label", don't just assume that if you bought it from the store yesterday it must be fresh), and I sometimes get failures from using my own yogurt as a starter if I leave it too long between making batches.

As far as I know there is nothing special about the microorganisms in Greek yogurt. It is the process that makes it different from regular yogurt. You can make Greek yogurt using any live yogurt. I can't find anything on the Total website about the particular culture they use.

Good luck, Anonymous, with your quest to make perfect Greek yogurt. I don't know about you, but I always enjoy this kind of journey immensely. The sense of satisfaction when you achieve your goal is indescribable. Please keep in touch and let us know if you learn anything new about yogurt making.

Dried Sourdough

One thing I haven't yet tried in my sourdough journey has been drying my own sourdough cultures to preserve them. It's a useful security measure in case anything happens to your continuous culture - if you forget to feed it so it dies for example, or if your dog eats it all, or something like that. I'd heard it was pretty easy so I decided to give it a go.


You have to make sure your starter culture is healthy and active to start with. It's a waste of time to dry a weak and inactive starter. I dried my San Francisco starter because I used up all the dried starter I was sent from America, and wanted to keep a store of it.

1. All you have to do is spread out a teaspoonful of sourdough starter onto some kind of paper, such as greaseproof paper or baking paper. I used waxed paper, simply because I had some already. Spread it pretty thinly because it will dry quicker and more evenly that way

2. Once you have a thin even layer of sourdough on a piece of paper, place it in a safe place to dry out. I put mine close to a radiator, out of the way of prodding children.

3. It dried out overnight, crinkling up the paper as it did. You can see it in the photograph on the left.

4. Once it was dry I crumbled it into flakes. You only need a small pinch of these to make a new starter, because the beasts will multiply very quickly once you start feeding them. To reconstitute it, mix a pinch of dried flakes with a couple of tablespoons of cooled boiled water. Leave it for a few hours, then feed it a dessertspoon of strong white bread flour and half a dessertspoon of wholemeal or rye flour. Add a bit more cooled boiled water and stir well, then cover. Feed it this way two or three times a day and you should soon have a healthy active sourdough starter which will make delicious bread.

5. I stored the dried flakes in a plastic bag, clearly labelled. There's no way I'd be able to guess what these beige flakes are in a few months' time - they look like a lab sample of someone's horrible skin condition. I'll try to reconstitute them in a few weeks, just to test that it works. But I have great faith that it will. That's how the starter was sent to me in the first place.

Sourdough Apple Fritters

As promised, my recipe for sourdough apple fritters.

Sourdough Apple Fritters

Peel 2 or 3 or more apples, core them and slice them into rings. Beat together 1 1/2 cups of sourdough starter, 1 egg, some sugar (maybe 2 or 3 tablespoons? - I didn't measure, I just shook it in), a teaspoon of ground cinnamon, half a teaspoon bicarbonate of soda. Dip apple rings one at a time into flour then into the batter. Drop a battered apple ring into a saucepan half full of very hot oil. Fry for a minute or two on both sides and serve with vanilla ice cream. You could sprinkle cinnamon sugar on the fritters if you liked. I don't have a very sweet tooth and thought they were sufficiently sweet just as they were.

Sourdough Latkes

One of the nice things about baking sourdough bread daily is that you always have a dish of sourdough starter hanging about. Sourdough starter is flour and water which is fermenting - in other words, it's batter. So you can quickly cook anything that requires batter. I already posted a recipe for sourdough pancakes. I forgot to photograph my sourdough onion rings, but next time I make them I'll tell you all about it. I've plans to make sourdough apple fritters sometime soon. But today I want to show you my sourdough potato latkes.

It's basically the same recipe as the potato latkes I blogged about in July:

Grate two pounds of peeled potatoes and soak in cold water for at least a couple of hours. Strain the potatoes and dry them well, for example by wrapping in a tea towel and swinging them round your head. Do this outdoors. And don't blame me if you accidentally let go of a corner and decorate your garden with grated spuds. If you're chicken you could just pat them dry between sheets of kitchen paper. Put the potatoes in a large bowl and add a grated onion and plenty of freshly ground black pepper and sea salt.

But then instead of making batter from scratch, I took a cup and a half of sourdough starter. I added a beaten egg, a splash of milk and half a teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda. I mixed the spuds with the sourdough batter, then fried dessertspoonsful of the mixture in butter, in a frying pan.

You can serve them as a side dish with roasted stuffed butternut squash, as I planned to do. But apparently they taste better red hot from the pan, stolen from the cook, and eaten with your hands burning your fingers in the process.

2007 Retrospective

2007 was the year it rained. Non-stop. We had a lovely warm spring, but in May it began to rain and it didn't stop until August. This had a bad effect on our fruit and vegetable growing. Although some crops did well, others suffered either directly from the wet, or indirectly from the slugs and snails and our failure to go to the allotment as often as we should.

We got two colonies of bees from Ally of Ducking for Apples, but they went berserk and attacked all my neighbours, so I had to move them to an apiary a few miles away. We haven't taken any honey from them this year. Due to the weather the bees weren't able to forage as much nectar so their honey stores by the end of the season were low. But our own foraging efforts were pretty good as the weather dried up somewhat in the autumn. We made beer, which exploded, several batches of wine which aren't ready yet, and lots of different types of liqueur.

I became interested in ginger beer, and made a yeast-culture ginger beer plant from scratch. I later learned that real ginger beer is made using an authentic symbiotic culture called ginger beer plant. So I got one of those and now have my own continuous ginger beer production line. I picked wild mushrooms for the first time in my life. I cooked and ate them and didn't die. Which was nice. I haven't had any success identifying other types of mushrooms in my area, though, so I've left them alone. The ginger beer got me interested in other useful microbial cultures, and so I started making sourdough bread using wild yeast rather than packets of dried yeast from the shop. There are other types of useful culture, such as kefir and tibicos, and I'd like to try those in future.

I'll be glad when 2007 is over, just because of the ghastly weather we've had all year. The rain has been heavy again in November and December, and often when I've been out driving I've had to slow right down to go around puddles that cross both lanes of a dual carriageway. There are what look like ponds in the middle of many fields which should be dry, but they have had a standing puddle so long the grass underneath must be dead by now. I know there's no logical reason to imagine that on 1st January 2008, the sun will come out and everything will be different. But psychologically it feels like it might.

Ginger Beer Around the World

I sent some ginger beer plant grains to a nice lady in Florida, in exchange for some sourdough starters. I made some delicious bread with the starters she sent me, and she is making ginger beer with hers. I love the label she made for her bottles.

It's fun to swap cultures with people and make friends all over the world. Of course, home-made bread and ginger beer is also a nice by-product.

How to Make Greek Yogurt

If I convinced you that everyone should make yogurt, here's how to do it in ten easy steps (and with no special equipment).

1. Fill a thermos flask with milk (you can choose any kind of milk - skimmed milk, full cream, goats milk - anything at all), then pour it into a microwave-safe container or a pan.

2. Bring the milk to the boil. I used a microwave, but you could heat it on a stove if you prefer. Just watch that it doesn't boil over. This step is to kill off any unwanted microbes that will cause the milk to spoil.

3. Allow the milk to cool to around 50°C (122°F). I've got a new whizzy electronic thermometer so I used that, but you could use any kind of thermometer, or you could stick your clean finger in it. 50°C isn't hot enough to burn you, but it's too hot to comfortably keep your finger in for long. This is the optimum temperature for the yogurt culture beasts to grow.

4. Add some live yogurt to the milk. You can use a little of your last batch, or you can buy some fresh yogurt to start your culture off. This contains some of the yogurt culture microbes that are going to multiply and turn the milk to yogurt. You don't need much. I usually use about a dessertspoon, but in extremis I have swilled the milk in an empty yogurt pot to rinse off the bits of yogurt clinging to the sides, and it worked fine.

5. Pour the proto-yogurt into the thermos flask. Fill it to the top. It won't change in volume at all. Now seal the flask and leave it somewhere it can be undisturbed for 8-14 hours. Overnight will be fine.

6. After 8-14 hours with any luck your flask will be full of yogurt. When you take the lid off, you'll think it has failed, because it has not changed in appearance at all. It gets me every time. But when you try to pour it out, you'll find it is no longer thin and liquid, but has thickened considerably*. But the chances are good that if you followed my instructions, you have made yogurt. Well done!

7. You can put your yogurt in another container and put it in the fridge (warm yogurt is kind of yuk) and eat it just as it is. But if you want to make Greek (strained) yogurt, there is another step to the process. Pour your yogurt into a muslin cloth, and suspend it over a bowl for two hours (I put the cloth in a colander over a bowl).

8. After two hours the colourless liquid whey will have strained into the bowl and the remaining yogurt will be thickened and creamier. You couldn't pour it now. You'll have to scrape it off the muslin cloth.

9. Congratulations, you've made Greek yogurt. It's deliciously thick and creamy, even when made with skimmed milk. It's more stable in cooking than normal yogurt (but did you know that if your yogurt separates when cooking, you can stir in a spoonful of cornflour and stabilise it?). I like it on its own with honey. It also makes wonderful raita.

10. If you leave it straining for longer than 2 hours it becomes thicker and thicker and eventually will have a consistency like cream cheese. Stir in garlic and herbs if you like, and use it like Philadelphia. Delicious.

*Well - sometimes batches fail. It happens to everyone. Here's a troubleshooting list:

• If the milk was too hot when you added the culture, all the beasts will have been killed. Warm it up to 50°C (122°F), add more culture and try again.
• If the milk was too cold, the beasts won't have reproduced. Warm it up to 50°C (122°F) but no hotter and try again
• If the starter was old, it may not have had any live beasts in it to begin with and the milk will still be runny. You'll need to get a fresh starter from the shops. It's up to you what you do with the warm milk. I suggest cocoa.
• If the milk was old it may have curdled. Pour it away, it's ruined.
• If the equipment wasn't clean, some spoilage microbes may have got in and spoiled the yogurt. Pour it away, it's ruined.
• If you didn't leave it long enough, it won't have had time to set (sometimes it seems sort of slimy but not really thick). Make sure it's still warm enough and leave it a bit longer.
• If you left it too long, it may have separated into yellow whey and white curds. It's fine. You can stir it back together, or use it as it is to make Greek yogurt.

Baguettes

Now that I can reliably make tasty, well-shaped sourdough boules every day, I decided to try my hand at a different shape - sourdough baguettes. Here is my first attempt. A bit misshapen, and rather short because my oven isn't as big as a commercial bakery, but definitely baguettes nonetheless.

10 Reasons Why Everyone Should Make Yogurt

• it's the easiest culture you'll ever make, easier than ginger beer or sourdough bread
• it's cheaper than buying it
• you can have organic yogurt, skimmed milk yogurt, gold top yogurt, goat's milk yogurt, Jersey yogurt - anything you like
• it's fun to know how things are made
• you can make it into soft cheese
• it's delicious
• it's good for you
• you can put a dollop in a chili or curry that's too hot and it will cool it right down
• you can make a quick and low fat salad dressing (just add your favourite seasonings, stor, and use like mayonnaise)
• you can freeze it and make home-made frozen yogurt - now that really is the good life

Fred and Ginger

I've still got a little Ginger beer left (from my yeast culture), although we are moving over to Fred beer production (made with the authentic ginger beer plant). I thought I'd show you this picture of the final brews side by side. the Fred beer is on the right. You can see it has a much redder colour. Ginger on the left is very pale in comparison.

There are other differences besides the culture. Fred is fed on brown sugar whilst Ginger has white sugar. That's 8 teaspoons over a week and presumably contributes to Fred's reddish colour. In both cases the final brew is sweetened with white sugar. Ginger has the juice of a lemon in the final brew, which might bleach out a little of her natural colour.

As well as a richer colour, Fred has the better taste, too, which is why we've killed off Ginger. The latest batch of Fred beer is extremely peppery, but the kids still drink it, although Sam has taken to getting a glass of water and a glass of Fred beer. He has a drink of Fred and then takes a sip of water to cool it down a bit.

Loaf Baked in Cloche

Here's today's sourdough loaf baked in my poor-man's cloche. I'm going to say no more. The picture says it all.

My Starters Have Arrived

My sourdough starters arrived from Florida today. Each one is just a few grams of dried flakes, but when I mix them with water and flour the yeasty beasties will come back to life and start multiplying. Soon I can make Sanfrancisco sourdough bread, and champagne grape bread (the bread doesn't contain champagne or grapes - the starter was made with champagne grapes).

In return, I have sent some ginger beer plant to the nice lady in Florida who gave me these starters. It's a cross-cultural exchange.

Cowpat Bread

If yesterday's sourdough bread was Dali-esque bread, today's bread is cowpat bread. It was even wetter (slacker) than yesterday and just sort of slopped all over the baking sheet when I turned it out. It then rose spectacularly and looks pretty great inside (tastes great too) so we don't mind. But I would like to make bread that looks as good as it tastes.

Someone on The Fresh Loaf suggested dusting the banneton with rice flour to help with sticking. And of course I need to learn to add just the right amount of water to get the light holey loaf I want without the cowpat effect. I'll get there. I'm much happier with this bread than with handome loaves I've made in the past that were dense and chewy.

Culture Roundup

I've been making ginger beer once a week and dividing my culture each time. Today I weighed how much culture I have and it is less than 100g. I've been advised to try to maintain it at about 150g. So I haven't divided it this week, but I'll try to build it up.

It's a bit like having a pet. You can't neglect it, you have to be faithful in feeding it, and making sure it is at a reasonable temperature, and keep an eye out for its welfare.

I have three cultures at the moment that I'm maintaining - Fred, the ginger beer plant (pictured), Fizz the sourdough bread starter, and my yogurt culture who doesn't have a name.

Bread Tasting

Well I didn't wait until the bread was cold, but it was just warm rather than hot straight from the oven. How did it taste? A bit of a mix - good and bad points. It's certainly bread (rather than a brick of glue like my first attempt), made with only wild leavening, so that's fun. It didn't taste noticeably sour, though. It was white bread, and I'm not a fan of white bread. I tend to find it tasteless. I wouldn't say this bread was entirely tasteless, but nor would I say it was an orgasm on my tastebuds. Closer to "food that makes you go hmmm" rather than "food that makes you go wow!". But I'll keep trying. I'll make bread that makes people go "wow!" soon.

What do I need to change? The Silverton book has recipes that include flavouring ingredients such as olives, walnuts, cheese etc. I'm sure any of those would be tasty. But I want the bread to be "wow!" bread, not "hmm" bread with tasty ingredients. I might get a better flavour with a different starter. I'm still waiting for them to arrive from the States. When they arrive I can experiment, and perhaps that will provide the wow! factor. Or I can try making wholemeal bread instead. I like wholemeal bread much better than white bread (it's fair to say I like wholemeal anything better than white anything. I don't understand why people choose to eat polystyrene, whilst brown rice, wholemeal pasta, wholemeal flour etc. have a grungy hippy image. I like my pasta, rice and bread to taste of something.)

I'll probably try different flours then. Wholemeal flour, rye flour, spelt flour. I'm having lots of fun learning this new breadmaking technique. And these loaves are at least edible, not like my first sourdough loaf which went in the bin. I'll feed some to the kids when they get home, and if the worst comes to the worst I'll make it into cheesey bread pudding.

Sourdough Loaves - Attempt #2

My first attempt at making sourdough bread was not a success. The instructions told me to make my starter and then use it exactly the same as yeast. It didn't work, probably because my starter was not active enough at that point, and also because sourdough is not yeast. It needs totally different baking techniques, including (but not limited to) much longer proving times.

So I fed up my starter and when it was very active I tried again. This time I followed the very detailed descriptions for sourdough bread from Nancy Silverton's sourdough bible, Breads from the La Brea Bakery.

This attempt is much more of a success. The bread behaved as Silverton said it would. Primarily it rose as it should. They don't have that nice spiral pattern because my proofing basket hasn't arrived yet, so I proofed them in mixing bowls lined with tea towels. They have taken the shape of the folds and creases in the towels, and are somewhat misshapen and asymmetrical as a result. When I dusted them with flour, I think I used too much. I slashed the loaves with my sharpest knife but the cut is still ragged, because the surface of the bread was tougher than I expected. Silverton recommends the use of a tool called a lame, which is like a razor mounted on a stick. Perhaps I can make my own. My loaves are also darker than I expected, and I'm not sure why that is. I didn't bake it as hot as she said to, because my oven doesn't go up to 500°F. Is my bread overcooked? Or is sourdough bread supposed to look like this? Silverton says:

If I had to choose a Crayola-box crayon to describe its colour, it would be burnt sienna.

Yes, you could say this bread is burnt sienna. Or maybe it's just burnt. I'll know when I taste it, but I'm not allowed to eat it yet. Silverton insists I must wait until it is cool. I don't think I can wait that long.

Sourdough Pancakes

I've been feeding up my sourdough starter, and it's grown pretty big. I don't need this much starter to make bread, but that's OK - there are lots of uses for surplus starter. For example, we've been eating sourdough pancakes.

Sourdough Pancakes

To a cup and a half of sourdough starter, add a beaten egg, a tablespoon of sugar, a tablespoon of melted butter, two teaspoons of ground salt, two tablespoons of milk and beat well. At the last moment, add half a teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda and beat in, then make your pancakes. (The soda reacts with the lactic acid in the starter and makes bubbles of carbon dioxide. These expand in the hot pan and make the pancakes rise. The end result is somewhere between a drop scone and a crumpet). Drop a dessertspoon into a hot frying pan with a little melted butter. You can probably fit 3 or 4 of these little pancakes in your pan at a time. Cook until golden brown on one side, then flip over. Cook for less than a minute until golden brown and serve hot with syrup. My kids devour them, and my husband is very keen, too.

(If you haven't been following the story so far and you're wondering what "sourdough starter" is, it's a mixture of flour and water which is fermenting. You use it to make naturally leavened bread, without store-bought yeast, although there is "wild" yeast in the starter, along with other microorganisms. You can buy sourdough starters, and you can make your own. I made this one. If you don't have one you can't make this recipe. You could substitute a batter of flour and water and you can make some pancakes, but they won't be sourdough pancakes and they won't froth up as I described.)

Sourdough Update

I made bread with my home-made sourdough starter but it wasn't a great success (that's not it in the photograph). My loaf didn't rise well and so was very dense with a gluey texture. The taste was intriguing, though - certainly different from bread made with commercial yeast. I was following the instructions in Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Fizz Carr's book, The River Cottage Family Cookbook, and I think maybe that's the problem - I need a specialist sourdough bread reference.

So I bought Nancy Silverton's book Breads from the La Brea Bakery. It's supposed to be "the I am" of sourdough baking. But I didn't fancy her instructions for making a starter because the quantities were too great - you end up with 7lbs of starter! That's great for a commercial bakery, but crazy for home use.

I decided to build up the starter I have already made, using the principles in the Silverton book, but with smaller quantities. So I have been feeding it two or three times a day, and stirring it in between times, in the hope of making it a bit more active. It's definitely working and today I have taken the plunge and tried again to makebread with it. This time I'm following Silverton's instructions. Again her quantities are too big - I am making two large loaves of bread. What's more, the whole process takes two days. This really is not a book for someone who wants to whip up a little bit of bread for their own family without too much bother. But I've invested in the book and I'm hoping to learn some general principles that I can simplify for my own situation.

I am still waiting for the two starters which a kind person on the Yahoo Sourdough group has mailed me from Florida. I've also ordered a baking stone - that's a heavy stone slab you place in your oven when baking bread or pizza. It recreates the conditions in stone-built bread ovens, and is supposed to make a big difference to your finished bread. And just for fun, I ordered a cane proofing bowl. It's a spiral basket you put the boule of dough in for it's final rise before baking, and it's what give the loaves in the picture their characteristic spiral pattern. It's fun to play with a totally different way of making bread.

The Pepsi Challenge

My authentic ginger beer (Fred) is ready to drink today, so I did my own version of the Pepsi challenge and poured out a glass of Fred beer and a glass of Ginger beer (the yeast-culture version) and got all the family to taste them and say which they liked best.

They didn't know which was which, but they unanimously chose the authentic Fred beer. It's hard to describe flavours in words, and I'm no Oz Clarke, but it has a fuller, more complex taste. It's certainly peppery with the ginger, but it's also fruity and tangy. The yeast culture ginger beer is peppery and sharp. It's refreshing and tasty, and the kids have been drinking it faster than I can make it. But the new one is even better.

So poor old Ginger, the yeast culture ginger beer plant, has to go. I have a batch ready to be made into beer today, but I won't keep the culture going after that. I'll use it to leaven a loaf of ginger bread or something - after all it's yeasty and gingery. But I'll certainly keep Fred going, and I'll try to build him up to make bigger batches for us.

Home-Made Sourdough Starter

Sourdough bread starters have some things in common with ginger beer plants:

• both are symbiotic cultures of bacteria and yeasts (known in some circles as "beasts")
• both are "fed" in order to multiply and grow, before being divided when you want to use them
• After division, part of the culture is used to make the product, either ginger beer or bread, and part is kept and fed again

But they also have some differences:

• There is only one ginger beer plant, as far as I know, but there are many sourdough cultures and each one is different
• You can only get an authentic ginger beer plant from someone who already has one, but you can make a sourdough starter from scratch

I tried to make a sourdough starter from scratch on Saturday, using the instructions in Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Fizz Carr's River Cottage Family Cookbook. I've called it Fizz. I thought of calling it Hugh, but since it's supposed to bubble and froth, I thought Fizz was more appropriate. I won't reproduce the recipe here, if you want it you'll have to buy the book, but basically you mix flour, water and orange juice, then feed it every day with more flour and water until the natural beasts in the flour multiply.

So far it's looking a wee bit frothy, but it's not very lively. I need to feed it again today, and tomorrow I can use it to make bread. I'm also waiting for an established starter to arrive in the post, so I can compare it with my home-made version.