Food Hack - Recession Edition
Improve the scalability of your yogurt solution with this easy to follow how-to.
Wednesday, 2009-03-04 | Cookbook
In the spirit of the Gawker-owned blog LifeHacker.com's recent preference for recession/depression-themed "life hacks", I hereby tender the following procedure for stretching your yogurt dollar.
The instructions below, which were made available to YT by an anonymous source, explain how to turn a little bit of brand-name yogurt into a lot of brand-name yogurt using powdered milk and your Thermos.
Here's what you'll need:
- A decent-sized Thermos or similar device--a vessel that, when capped, will retain the lion's share of the heat of its contents for a period of approximately 24 hours.
- A baking thermometer. You can ballpark temperatures with yogurt more than you can with, say, leavened bread, but the official procedure calls for specific temperature ranges.
- 5 1/4 cups of water.
- 2 1/4 cups of powdered milk (watch out for melamine--it's not just for Chinese babies anymore).
- 1/4 cup of live culture yogurt. My source likes Nancy's yogurt (which you can apparently buy at Whole Foods), but anything with living Lactobacillus bulgaricus and Streptococcus thermophilus cultures in it should do the trick.
- Before you do anything else, you're going to want your source yogurt to be at room temp; cold yogurt will make this procedure substantially more difficult than is absolutely necessary.
- Bring the 5 1/4 cups water to something approaching a boil. You're shooting for something in the range of 120-140 degrees F.
- Mix the hot water and the 2 1/4 cups of powdered milk.
- Having made sure that the temperature of your water/milk mixture is approximately safe for yeast (110-130 in my experience), go ahead and add the yogurt
- Seal the Thermos (or non-brand-name vacuum-sealed food container) and shake it like a crying baby.
- Leave the whole thing in a cool, dry place to ferment for 24-30 hours.
- Open the Thermos, transfer the contents to another vessel and refrigerate.
Additionally, my source adds that you may strain your "homemade" yogurt through cheesecloth and create something he calls "yogurt cheese", which is spreadable and, depending on how long you let it drain through the cheesecloth, can become cream cheese-like.