Category — dairy

Homemade yoghurt

I love yoghurt. I eat it almost every day in some form (sometimes with fresh berries and bananas but usually in my morning smoothie). I decided that my next culinary challenge would be to learn how to make yoghurt. Ricotta cheese was so easy, so yoghurt couldn’t be that hard. Right?

Turns out the biggest trick is finding a good incubator that will keep the milk at the right temperature as the bacteria cultures go to work and turn your runny milk into yoghurt. There are a lot of commercially available products but because we have WAY too many appliances of the kitchen variety in our home I was challenged by my boyfriend to see if I could rig something up from found objects around the house.

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Finished ricotta

I went to a cheese making course at the UBC Farm a couple of weeks ago. The course was inspiring and I learned so much in the short 3 hour course. Obviously in 3 hours you can’t learn everything about cheese but it provided a nice foundation and has inspired me to try my hand at making cheese at home.

I decided to start with ricotta because it’s easy and didn’t require any special cultures or rennet and I was impatient to give ‘er a go. Ricotta is actually traditionally made from the whey left over from making other types of cheeses but you can make it straight from milk. I found a clear and easy to follow recipe over at about.food.com and got to work. Check out there recipe by following the link.

The recipe called for a gallon of milk and I didn’t really know how many liters are in a gallon. My buddy Google came to the rescue (its about 4) and that was pretty much the hardest part of making the cheese.

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