Welcome back to this fifteenth installment in my essay series about fermentation – and what it has to offer you, both in edible and in non-edible ways…
Two essays ago, I promised you we’d talk about the most important factor for fermentation at all. And after a short detour through the hands-on aspects of fermentation last time, I’m happy to say that, finally, this is the day – today, I’m going to reveal said most important factor! 🙂
Granted, it’s not exactly a secret what this factor is. Or rather, it’s not exactly a secret if you have actually read the previous essays, as this mysterious factor has peered through about every second line of them.
Still, we’ve never talked about this factor explicitly, and have rather only ever taken its presence for granted. Thus, today, we’re going to remedy this, and we will of course also discuss some facts about it which we haven’t really touched on before – otherwise this would be a rather boring essay full of things you already know, wouldn’t it? 😉
This mysterious factor, the most important one at all, by far, for fermentation is…
drum roll please!
… the wee fermentation critters, of course!
(Why, what else did you expect? 😀)
I mean, it’s a pretty simple equation, after all. While temperature, oxygen, and all the other factors we’ve had a look at are quite important for successful fermentation, and some of them are even important, no critters = no fermentation, pure and simple.
’cause in the end, fermentation is only the wee fermentation critters’ digestion, remember? 🙂
And of course, as I wrote a little further up, those critters have been hiding in plain sight, all over the previous essays. We’ve talked about their food and their excretions, their breathing, their comfort temperature, and many other things related to them.
What we’ve never talked about, though, are the critters themselves. And since within the past umpteen essays, we’ve covered all other details of the actual process of fermentation and what happens within it, I think it’s about high time we turned towards its most important factor today…
It’s funny, though, isn’t it? These little critters have been so omnipresent and so self-evident all throughout fermentation, it feels as if they have been around forever. And in a way, that’s indeed how it is.
Some hundred thousand years ago, give or take a few months, some of our great-great-whatnot-ancestors sat together around their campfire, after a long hard day spent hunting and gathering. They were appropriately tired after a hard day’s work out in the fresh air, after walking many miles to find and gather their food (and in some cases after having to fight said food tooth and nails before it agreed to be carried to said campfire).
Still, no rest for the wicked – and the food they had spent so much time and effort on hunting and gathering was likely to spoil in the summer’s heat. Which, in turn, meant that exhausted as they were, they still needed to get off their behinds again, and do their best to cook, boil, dry, or otherwise process as much of the meat, fruit and veggies as they could even in that very night.
For the alternative was to leave their bounty to spoil, thus having to fan out right again tomorrow to gather new, fresh food for the next day. And then the next. And the next.
“This kind of life really sucks.” said one of them. To which another one replied “Big time.”
They stared into the fire some more, each brooding about how so much easier life would be if only food could be stored without all the drying and smoking and all the other time-consuming steps.
If only their food would conserve itself somehow, they could simply get their well-deserved night’s rest right after such a hard day, and without their hard-won harvest spoiling. And if the food would even become a bit softer and easier to digest along the way… ’cause gnawing at stringy dried roots was all nice and well – as long as you had good teeth!
And so they sat there, staring broodingly into the fire – until, all of a sudden, one of them grinned a very big grin, and said to the others “You know what? We’ve been incredibly dumb all this time. What we need is some livestock.”
To be fair, while the others thought he was probably some flintstones short of a working axe (suggesting they should keep animals on top of everything else they had to do to survive, only to then having to feed them as well!), they did their best to be polite and offered him more water to cure his heat stroke. It had been a hot day, after all, and he was usually a rather sensible person.
But this particular forebear of ours wasn’t that easily derailed. He waved them all off and said “No, folks, listen – you don’t get it. I don’t mean we should tame and breed wild horses, bisons, or wolves. What a very stupid and pointless thing, nobody in their right mind would do that! No, what we should tame and keep as livestock are fermentation critters!”
“Fer… whut??” said the chieftain of that little clan, somewhat confused.
“Fermentation critters. The wee things which live all around us, on plants and the earth, and which ferment the wild fruit once it lies on the ground. You know, those ones. If we could tame them and keep them on the foodstuffs we want to store, they could eat some of those and keep the rest from spoiling.
The stuff we hunt and gather would taste a bit more tart in the end, and it would also bubble (yuck!) – but it would also soften up quite a bit, and in any case, wouldn’t that be a small price to pay for food which stores?”
The quick thinker of the group got it first and cried: “This is ingenious! They’d feed us, they’d nourish us, they’d keep us healthy, and they’d provide us with great food and drinks!”
Understanding slowly spread across the face of the chieftain, culminating in a sly smile: “And we’d also have fermented fruit all year long, and not just in the autumn. You know what, I’m beginning to like this idea. So how do we tame wild fermentation critters? Anybody got any suggestions?”
And this, folks, is how our ancestors started to breed and keep the fermentation critters we still ferment with today.
Of course, though, that’s not really what happened back then!
For as everybody knows, the human “discovery” of fermentation was a purely accidental thing, after all:
One day, some of those same forebears of ours left some of their food standing out in the sun for too long, and once it was fermented, the bravest one of them dared to try it anyway – only to discover that a. it didn’t kill him (or her) right away, contrary to what had been settled knowledge, and b. that it actually tasted quite good. Thus fermentation was born – or so the scientific legend goes… 😉
(In reality, though, both of these stories are wrong – the relationship between fermentation critters and us started out quite differently. Who knows, I might tell you the true story below… 😉 )
In any case, and however it all started out, us humans ended up having a whole bunch of varied and enterprising livestock at our disposal: sourdough critters, beer critters, veggie critters, meat critters, and many more.
Each of these kinds of livestock needed to be fed with specific kinds of foods, and they all had their own preferred environmental conditions. But overall, they were rather easygoing animals to keep, not hard to please, and best of all:
Whatever came out the other end of their digestion stored much better, and it wasn’t just edible, but downright delicious (well, in most cases), and healthy on top of that.
Thus the relationship between this rather unusual livestock and their human owners thrived, and continued to develop and to adapt over the ages.
And over the millenia to follow, as with any livestock we breed, we (or rather, our ancestors) adapted these wee critters more and more towards our needs. Just like dogs and cats have spread all over the world thanks to their role as human pets, so have certain kinds of fermentation critters which, left alone to their devices, would play a marginal role in nature at best.
For example, Saccharomyces cerevisiae has, more or less, conquered the world – after all, it’s one of the primary yeasts used in winemaking, beermaking and the baking of fermented bread… Left to its own devices, and without being pampered by its human keepers, it might show up here and there in autumn on some grains and fruits, and that’s it.
And now, many, after many thousand years of this successful mutual relationship, the fermentation critters have become so intertwined with our lives that it’s probably not fair to profanely call them “livestock” anymore – “pets” would be more appropriate. After all, it’s a commonplace that over time, pets and their owners become more and more alike… 😀
Now granted, we haven’t exactly turned into bacteria or yeasts (to name the critters by their actual names for once). But we have become adapated to them in ways which are almost too amazing to believe.
For example, our gut flora and digestion are geared towards the critters which live in our intestines. And some of these intestinal boarders of ours are the ones we ingest, and especially the ones humanity has ingested for what feels like forever through our fermented foods and drinks.
Our own lives have become so intertwined with the lives of this most curious “livestock” of ours, that if we suddenly had to make do without them, this would have serious repercussions on our health, among other things.
(A very good reason to eat more home-fermented foods!)
But rather recently in history, something fundamental has changed in the relationship between us and this most ancient of our livestock – or rather, two somethings…
Both of them are due to the fact that modern life has opened a growing chasm between man and nature. What was perfectly natural for our ancestors, is no longer so for us. Among these things is home fermentation – and dealing with nature and her “dangers” in general.
Since we no longer routinely deal with said dangers, we have a much harder time judging them fairly and sensibly. And as a result, certain things seem like a piece of cake to us even though they bear considerable dangers.
(As evidenced by the amount of people attempting to do things like climb Mount Everest, for example, even though they clearly don’t have the experience and the skills to do so.)
And other dangers we overblow completely, although the thing in question is completely harmless, or its perceived dangers can be very well managed with just a little bit of experience and/or common sense.
Among the latter, alas, is home fermentation – mainly because many people nowadays are deadly afraid of “germs” or “pathogens”.
Now, don’t get me wrong – I’d rather not catch a sepsis either, thank you very much! But a lot of people are so afraid of poisoning themselves or their families that they blow this danger way out of proportion when it comes to fermentation:
This leads to instructions for home fermentation where, for example, jars have to be sterilized, and then sterilized again with yet another method, just to be sure.
Fermentation, with its very own tiny critters, is too close for some people’s comfort to other small critters which can indeed by dangerous.
(I mean, the association is easy to draw: Yeast? Icky! Bacteria? Yuck – and dangerous!!)
So these people try to control the process of fermentation. Fully and absolutely, down to the last tiniest critter which goes astray in their ferments – if they ferment at all, that is…
Of course, that’s not just no fun (like, not at all)!
When all you ever do during fermentation, and worse: When all you ever do when you eat or drink your ferments, is to wonder whether any dangerous critters got in and will kill you in 3… 2… 1… well, I wouldn’t exactly call this enjoyable!
Thus it’s no wonder that people in our modern societies, with their almost pathological fear of pathogens and germs, don’t trust fermentation. The consequence from this is twofold:
First, with less and less practical, hands-on experience under their belts, less and less people know how to ferment, and how to avoid the (few) traps and pitfalls. As a consequence, more fermentation processes go wrong than in a society with a well-established fermentation culture – most of use have simply never learned how to do it.
And secondly, much fewer people even attempt to ferment food and drinks at home. Which, in turn, only increases the problem.
(As a bonus third consequence, consider what is bound to happen when people are told time and again not to trust natural processes, and not to trust their own intuition, because “you can’t see these deadly pathogens and will only know it once they’ve killed you”…)
As you can see, this has put a bit of a dent in the relationship between us and our long-standing buddies, the wee fermentation critters. 😉
There is another, second consequence of living in a modern society, though, a consequence which has only exacerbated this rift between us and nature:
Nowadays, people are much less likely to produce stuff for themselves, and are wont to buy it from mass producers instead.
Now, mind you, I’m not complaining. If I had to spin all the yarn for my garments myself, weave cloth from it, and sew my clothes myself, I most definitely wouldn’t get around to writing essays about fermentation!
But there is a difference between “not doing it myself”, and “assuming the mass-produced stuff is superior”. Alas, for a lot of people nowadays this is a subtle difference, if they can even see it at all. Still, it exists, and it’s worth considering.
For example, you might decide to buy yogurt in the supermarket instead of fermenting your own, as we will do in today’s Homework.
Just to clarify, and as I hope this has become clear from my garment example a few lines further up, there’s nothing wrong with this at all! It would be foolish to think we all should and could home-produce everything for ourselves instead of buying it. Rather, doing so would pretty much take up most of people’s time, with the obvious consequences.
Of course, though, the yogurt you buy in the supermarket has to be produced by somebody. And as a lot of people buy their yogurts in the supermarket, this producer (or these producers) have to produce a lot of it.
Or, in other words: This isn’t yogurt made from milk which has sat on somebody’s kitchen counter, picking up wild fermentation critters from the air by persistent stirring. 😉
Rather, the companies need to be sure that the foodstuffs (and drinks) they produce meet certain standards. And in order to do so, they can’t rely on wild fermentation cultures – the end results would simply be too unpredictable.
Imagine a winemaker relying on such wild fermentation cultures. As each of these cultures are different, each of his caskets would end up with a different taste, a different acidity, a different alcohol content, etc.
Now imagine having to bottle this, put meaningful labels on each bottle, and to sell it to consumers – who might have loved the first bottle they bought from this winery, but then the second bottle was much more tart and not to their taste at all. I doubt these people would buy from this brand ever again!
There’s another issue with wild fermentation, of course, and it’s one you might already have encountered in your Hands-On Homeworks: Sometimes it simply goes wrong.
A ferment might not take off at all. Or it might go awry. Or the end taste might just be a bit off, or simply not to your liking, in contrast to similar batches before.
With wild fermentation cultures, each batch is an exciting adventure – not exactly the sort of excitement a commercial producer needs… 😉
Thus commercial production, whether on a smaller scale or on a very large one, has to standardize things by necessity. And in order to do so, it uses very particular, specifically chosen fermentation critters.
If you’ve ever checked out a brewers’ or winemakers’ supply store, you will have noticed this right away. There are very different critters options to choose from, for all different kinds of beers or wines, and all well-defined in their features and outcome:
This one will give you such-and-such alcohol content, this one will give you a percentage more, this one will produce a flowery taste, this one a tart one, and so on.
Essentially, these are fermentation monocultures:
You introduce just one (or just a few select) tightly controlled fermentation critters into your ferment, and you get the specific result these specific kind of critters are known for.
That’s also the reason why sterilization matters so much for this kind of fermentation, btw: If the jars etc aren’t sterilized beforehand, too many other, wild critters end up in your ferments, and could take over the culture (and thus give you a rather different kind of result!).
Of course, as all monocultures, such tightly controlled fermentation monocultures are inherently unstable.
If you keep re-using some of these ferments for the next batch and then the next one and so on, no matter how much sterilizing you do, how much hand sanitizing, and how hot you wash your produce beforehand and scrub it with vinegar (and don’t you dare to lick a spoon and then dip it into your ferment again!)… some wild critters will always get in, through the air if nothing else.
And over time, these little wild guys accumulate, and they reproduce – plus new ones enter the ferment from the environment all the time. Thus with each new batch you use the old starter for, there’ll be more of them. And if you keep re-using this fermentation culture, sooner or later, it ceases to be a mononculture, as other critters will take over.
Now, this doesn’t have to be a bad thing (hey, the result could taste even better than before!). But it’s not the stuff you chose in the catalogue anymore for its specific features.
Thus if you should decide to work with store-bought, pre-defined fermentation monocultures, you might be able to get away with “re-using” them for a little while.
But sooner or later, the quality of your ferment will change (and potentially degrade), and then at the latest you’ll need to eat and drink up your previous batches, stop using them as starter, and instead start out anew with a newly bought set of monoculture critters.
Of course, this is not just much less exciting and adventurous, it’s also a lot less fun. 🙂
(As you can probably tell, while I can totally see the necessity for the artificial ones for certain use cases, I’m partial to the wild ones – and I hope that through this series, you will get to know and love them, too! 🙂 )
There are cases where using specific store-bought fermentation cultures make perfect sense, though. Home cheese making is one of them, for example:
They allow you to make very specific and very different kinds of cheeses, all within the same environment of your home. If, say, you’d want to make a Camembert with wild cultures, you might have to make hundreds of attempts, and would potentially still not end up with anything remotely like a Camembert.
Thus predefined fermentation mono-cultures make sense in two cases:
First, if you want to achieve some very specific result which you’re unlikely to get from wild cultures, like the aforementioned Camembert.
If you just want some pleasant-tasting herbal wine, at the contrary, wild cultures will also get you there, although the resulting taste and alcohol content will vary from batch to batch.
(Of course, there are ways to preserve a wine culture you particularly like – but more about this next time…)
Btw, talking about herbal wines, back when I highly recommended Stephen Harrod Buhner’s excellent book “Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers”, I told you that I do have one issue with it – and this is it:
Quite obviously, Buhner is a child of our modern society. Despite being open to using plants of all kinds (he even discusses highly poisonous ones with a generous amount of common sense), and despite exploring wild fermentation of drinks through a host of cultures from all over the world, in his own recipes, he avoids wild fermentation like the plague and instead keeps using store-bought fermentation cultures.
It’s rather telling that even somebody as open to “uncivilized” fermentation as Buhner didn’t dare to take that very last leap of faith… ;-(
Anyway, and secondly, it makes sense to use a (bought) fermentation monoculture if the result you want to achieve is unlikely to be had in your local environment.
(There is a reason why certain kinds of cheeses have, for centuries, been cultivated in specific regions, and sometimes even only in that one cavern in this region – the critters needed for them are part of this local environment, and through constant fermentation processes, this has been reinforced even more.)
Or, in other words: No matter how often you try with wild fermentation cultures, if the critters you’d need for a specific outcome aren’t part of your natural environment, then how are they supposed to get into your ferment in the first place, other than by being artificially inserted?
The drawbacks of such store-bought fermentation cultures (for you) are that they cost money – and that you have to keep buying them again and again.
(For their producers, of course, that’s not so much a drawback as an advantage!)
Thus my advice would be to use such cultures sparingly, and only when necessary. There are a lot of ferments you can do perfectly well without them, even if you aren’t the most adventurous type!
(But then again, I’m partial to the wild ones, so… 😉 )
After all, it would be a shame if the wonderful relationship between us and this most special and most ancient of our livestocks would suffer badly, or even be disrupted for good, just because us modern humans are afraid of a few wee critters, right?
Oh, and since we’re talking about livestock and livestock owners again…
Further up, I promised to tell you the true story of how it all started between the wee fermentation critters and us.
It’s actually rather funny, you know? These fermentation critters and us have co-existed and co-evolved over such a long time. To them, it must feel as if we’d have been around forever… 😉
Some hundred thousand years ago, give or take a few months, some of the great-great-whatnot-ancestors of our modern-day fermentation critters met below a tree whose fruit had fallen a day ago, after a many long hours blowing around in the wind looking for new food. They were appropriately tired after a hard day’s work out in the fresh air, having had to deal with faulty landings on such disappointing surfaces as a wet stone and (yuck!) the behind of a wool mammoth.
Still, no rest for the wicked – the food they had spent so much time and effort on finding was likely to be eaten by other, nasty critters if they wouldn’t hurry up. For a while the only sound to be heard was that of eager munching (and burping).
Once they had reached a first sugar high and set out to reproduce the first time, one of them looked around and said: “This kind of life really sucks.”, to which another one replied “Big time.”
They stared at the fruit which was ever-so-slowly beginning to turn a bit more soft and tart, each brooding about how so much easier life would be if only food would be brought to them, in abundance, and they could procreate fast enough to keep those other guys at bay without having to fight them all the time.
And so they sat there, staring broodingly at the fruit – until, all of a sudden, one of them grinned a very big grin, and said to the others “You know what? We’ve been incredibly dumb all this time. What we need is some livestock.”
To be fair, while the others thought he probably was some sugars short of a ripe fruit (suggesting they should keep animals on top of everything else they had to do to survive, only to then having to feed them as well!), they did their best to be polite and offered him more water to cure his heat stroke. It had been a hot day, after all, and he was usually a rather sensible critter.
But this particular forebear of our critters wasn’t that easily derailed. He waved them all off and said “No, folks, listen – you don’t get it. I don’t mean we should tame wild trees, veggie plants, or fruit bushes. What a very stupid and pointless thing, nobody in their right mind would do that! No, what we should tame and keep as livestock are humans!”
“Hu… whut??” said the chieftain of that little fermentation tribe, somewhat confused.
“Humans. The large things which live all around us, walk around on the ground, and which hunt and gather plants and animals. You know, those ones. If we could tame them and make them hunt and gather those foodstuffs for us, we’d live in the land of plenty, and they could get our leftovers when we’re done.
Of course, we’d have to live with their choices (grain, yuck!) – but in any case, wouldn’t that be a small price to pay for food which is brought to us?”
The quick thinker of the group got it first and cried: “This is ingenious! They’d feed us, they’d nourish us, they’d keep us healthy, and they’d provide us with great food and drinks!”
Understanding slowly spread across the face of the chieftain, culminating in a sly smile: “And they’d also pick the most sugary foods for us, the ones we’d otherwise only end up on by accident. You know what, I’m beginning to like this idea. So how do we tame wild humans? Anybody got any suggestions?”
And this, folks, is how our fermentation critters’ ancestors started to breed and keep us as their personal food and drink suppliers… 😉
Inner Fermentation Homework
Your Inner Fermentation Homework for this essay is simple – which doesn’t necessarily make it easy. For the time you spend on this Homework, contemplate the following two questions:
- Which kinds of “livestock” do you keep and breed in order to help with your own Inner Fermentation?
- What or who keeps you as “livestock” to provide them with food?
Hands-On Fermentation Homework: Home-Made Yogurt
Yogurt is really simple to make at home. The biggest “challenge” of the process is getting the temperature right – and this is doable even without a thermometer, worst case through a little bit of trial and error.
I’m including the yogurt recipe as today’s Homework because it illustrates the issues of fermentation monocultures so well. Ideally, as your Homework you’ll ferment several batches of yogurt, one after the other, and keep re-using the same starter over again (see instructions below) – and then note how your ferments change (or degrade) over time.
If you don’t eat that much yogurt, though, rest assured that fermenting even one batch counts as successful Homework! 🙂
I have to admit that it’s been a while that we have fermented yogurt at home. Back when we did a lot of it, we even had a yogurt maker.
(If you ferment a lot of yogurt yourself, such a device makes it much more comfortable for reasons explained below, and they don’t cost an arm and a leg – but for just the occasional batch, you certainly don’t need them. And even regular yogurt fermentation can well be done without an electric yogurt maker!)
In any case, I meant to do another batch or two before this essay, just to freshen up my memory, but life happened, and I never quite got around to it. Still, fermenting yogurt isn’t rocket science, so we’ll be fine nonetheless… 😀
Stuff you need
What you’ll need for your very own zingy and tasty home-made yogurt is
- 1 litre of heat-treated milk (see below)
- 1-2 tablespoons of store-bought natural yogurt, ideally of a kind which is “with live cultures” or “probiotic” or something like that (see below)
- a pot and stove, or another way to heat up the milk
- optional, if you can’t use the pot you heated it up in: a bowl, jar, or similar, large enough to hold the litre of milk (not from plastic, and not from a metal or other substance which isn’t safe to use for acidic foods – stainless steel, glass, foodproof pottery etc would be fine)
- a way to keep the temperature (see below)
- jars or other vessels to store the yogurt in the fridge
Heat-treated milk
This is one of the cases where you want to work with clearly defined fermentation critters. In order to prevent other, undesirable critters from taking over, your milk has to have been heat-treated to kill all the critters which usually roam around in raw milk.
The easiest way to do so is by simply buying heat-treated milk, e.g. pasteurized or ultra heat treated (UHT). Or, in other words: Supermarket milk is perfectly fine, and a lot less of a hassle. 😉
If you want to use raw milk, you need to heat-treat it yourself beforehand, by bringing to a boil (or very close to a boil), and keeping at this heat for at least 10 minutes. As milk loves to both boil over and to burn in, this is a bit of trouble, hence my advice to use milk which has been heat treated, for simplicity’s sake.
Which kind of milk you use is up to you: cow, sheep, goat, or whatever other animal floats your boat.
(Home-made sheep yogurt is delicious, btw, and feels much richer than cow yogurt.)
Plant-based milks supposedly work for yogurt making, but I’ve never tried it myself. If you want to avoid animal milk, do some research beforehand and make sure your choice of plant milk ferments with the cultures from store-bought yogurt – or go all in, treat is as an adventure, and simply give it a try… 😉
Full-fat milk gives full-fat yogurt, whereas low-fat milk… well, duh! 😉 Unless you absolutely have to be careful with fat, I recommend using full-fat milk. Your yogurt will taste and feel much nicer that way.
Store-bought yogurt
Ideally, you want a starter yogurt with living critters. This is easiest to achieve when you can get a yogurt which is labelled something like “with live culture” or “probiotic” or anything the like. If all you can get is plain yogurt, by all means, go with that – chances are good it’ll work anyway.
Note that fruit yogurt won’t do the trick, though, and neither will yogurt with sugar or sweeteners or any other additives! What you need is plain, natural yogurt.
A Way to keep things warm
In order for milk to ferment to yogurt, it needs to be kept at roughly 42 – 45 degrees Celsius for a few hours (i.e. roughly 107 – 113 degrees Fahrenheit, if the online calculator has calculated corrrectly 😉 ).
There are different ways to achieve this, some simpler or cheaper than others:
If you have access to a yogurt maker or can borrow one for this Homework, by all means use it. It’ll keep the milk within the right temperature range, and save you the hassle of the other methods.
If you have an old-fashioned stove where you can switch on the lights and they will stay on for a few hours, put the milk in there and leave on the lights. That should give you roughly the right temperature. (Feel free to use a thermometer to double-check if you have one.)
If not, you’ve still got two options:
The easier (but slightly more costly) one is to put everything into the oven anyway, and set its temperature to about 42 degrees Celsius/110 degrees Fahrenheit. If you have a thermometer, again, feel free to double-check – some ovens go above or below the temperature settings quite a bit.
If your oven doesn’t have such a low temperature setting, heat it up to 50 degrees Celsius/122 Fahrenheit, and then switch it off right away and keep the door closed. That should keep roughly the right temperature.
(Note: Modern ovens might try to “cool” down using their fan, thus this last method might not work for them.)
The somewhat more involved, but free method is to get everything to the right temperature (see instructions below), and then to wrap your pot/bowl into blankets/towels to insulate it and keep the temperature, and/or to put it into an insulating box of suitable size (make sure your box can stand the slightly raised temperature!).
Whatever method you go with, don’t fret about getting the very last degree right – I highly doubt that cheap yogurt makers hit exactly the right degree either, and they still work fine… 😉
Oh, and don’t spend money on a yogurt maker unless you know for sure you’ll ferment a lot of it!
Instructions
- Put the milk into a pot and heat it up close to boiling, about 90 degrees Celsius/195 Fahrenheit.
The heat changes something in the protein structure. I’m not entirely sure if this step is even necessary for heat-treated milk (it would obviously have been heated up before already), but since I didn’t have time to do test runs with and without, I recommend heating it anyway, just to be on the safe side. (If you should experiment with both and compare, let us know about your findings in the comments, please!)
If you want to let the milk ferment in another vessel but the pot you heated it up in, pour it into this other vessel right away. It’ll cool down faster, and it will also have time to warm up this new vessel to the necessary temperature.
- Then let it cool down to about 42 – 45 degrees Celsius/107 – 113 Fahrenheit. This is just a little bit warmer than body temperature. I.e. if you don’t have a thermometer, let the milk cool down until it feels just slightly warm to the touch.
- Stir in 1-2 tablespoons of the yogurt until it is well dissolved.
- Put the vessel/pot with the milk into your “keeping warm” device (see above) – or, if using a yogurt maker, pour the milk into it.
- Let your future yogurt rest undisturbed for about 6 – 10 hours. After this time, give it a try – the longer it ferments, the more tart it will be.
- Once you like the taste of the yogurt, remove it from the “keeping warm” device or from the yogurt maker, let it fully cool down, then put it into the fridge. The consistency will settle in the fridge, it gets firmer after a few hours.
- Enjoy your first batch – and keep 1-2 tablespoons as starter for the next batch!
- Rinse and repeat – until, see above, the quality of the yogurt changes in a way you don’t like. Once this happens, you’ll need to start over with a store-bought yogurt as starter.
Conclusions and Outlook
Today’s essay is important in two ways:
First, because it is the last essay which is concerned with what I called “the big in-between” – i.e. what happens to turn an unassuming base product into a delicious, healthty ferment, the process of fermentation in all its details.
With its spotlight on the wee fermentation critters, today’s essay covered the last important element of this process which we hadn’t covered before. As such, it also marks the end of a “series within the series”, so to speak… 😉
Secondly, and most obviously, today’s essay is important because it (finally!) covered the most important element of fermentation, namely the critters which are behind it all.
Although that’s not entirely true, is it? After all, we’ve talked about these wee guys and gals all throughout the series… 😉
Either way, I hope the more biochemically inclined of you aren’t disappointed by today’s essay. After all, I didn’t go into many details, besides calling them “bacteria and yeasts” once. Nothing about their biological or chemical functions, their internal structure, the ways they ferment various substances under different conditions, or anything the like…
But seriously, interesting as it might be, does any of this really matter for home fermentation?
What matters, though, is the age-old relationship between humans and fermentation critters – and how we can preserve and nurture this relationship not just for ourselves, but also for the future…
The next essay will take up this theme again, but from a different angle. 🙂
Barring any more unpleasant surprises like my recent cold, it will go up on on Sunday, October 11th. And as usual, I’m looking forward to your thoughts, questions and comments below! 🙂
Image: Daniel Quiceno M on Unsplash
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