Hello friends,
This is just a short post to share a hack I recently discovered:
As the baby starts solids, we have been giving her coconut milk yogurt (my babies generally don’t do well with dairy until they are almost a year old.) We discovered the GT’s brand Cocoyo, which has excellent ingredients and a good dose of probiotics, and she really enjoys it; however, it is expensive yogurt.
Then, I stumbled upon this post from Butter for All (one of my current favorite websites for recipes in general.) I followed the instructions carefully, and it worked! Hooray! I thought, no more buying expensive yogurt! Then I had an epiphany: if this mesophilic yogurt works with coconut milk, might it also work with raw cow’s milk?
In short, reader, it did. I kept the same ratio of one tablespoon of coconut yogurt to two-ish cups of milk, and whisked the two together in a glass jar. I covered the jar loosely and let it ferment on the counter until it was thick. It took a little more than 24 hours (probably because my house is chilly at night right now,) but yielded a good, thick raw yogurt. A few days later, I tested the strength of the culture by using a tablespoon of the raw yogurt to make a new batch. This batch was even better! It set more quickly than the original, too. Although I have successfully used a version of Wardee’s thermophilic raw yogurt in the past, this season of life seems to require simplifying kitchen work whenever possible. Thus, if I can just chuck some starter in a jar of milk and forget about it until the next day, so be it!
Hopefully, the culture will remain strong–I have heard that mesophilic yogurts require a pasteurized mother culture after some time, but we’ll see how this goes. If need be, I should just be able to use the homemade coconut yogurt again, as I think the canned coconut milk is usually heated before being canned.
This could also probably be done with pasteurized cow’s milk; I just haven’t tried it yet.
I hope you’re all having a blessed day!