Yogurt Chronicle, Part II

I have made yogurt, and now I'm ready to eat it.

Wednesday, February 22

My "production-scale" culture has indeed "set," and it looks ready to eat!  But I'm fasting today, so the sampling will have to wait until tomorrow.

Thursday, February 23

I finally get around to tasting my yogurt.  It's a little thicker than the "starter" batch, which is good--it has a better yogurty consistency.  The taste is decidedly sour, a bit tarter than I would have imagined.  It's not at all bad, definitely edible, but at this stage, it's missing something to make it truly tasty.








Monday, February 27

Time flies when you're making yogurt, and I'm already a day away from needing to propagate the culture.  I go ahead and do it today: the same one tablespoon of yogurt to one cup of milk ratio, and I should have production-scale batch number 2 ready to go tomorrow.

Now that I've propagated the culture, I think it's time to experiment with adding flavor.  First on the list of suggested added flavors is honey.  The recommendation is 1-2 teaspoons per cup of yogurt; my yogurt needs all the sweetness it can get, and I figure there's around a cup and a half left, so I add a tablespoon of honey.

It's tough to dissolve honey in cold, viscous milk.

The chemical engineer in me completely should have seen that coming, and I find myself wishing for some lab equipment.  (Who does microbiology work without a good shaker?)  But a few minutes with a spoon later, and the well-mixed assumption is no longer so invalid.

The yogurt has improved a lot with the added sweetness, though it's still not as homogeneous as I might have liked.  Next time I try adding a sweetener--and adding a sweetener is definitely the way to go--I'll let the yogurt warm up a little first.

Once Batch 2 is ready to go, in a day or two, I'll give the next sweetener a shot: fruit jam.