Our little 8-container yoghurt incubator works well for the Canadian bagged-milk situation. When I have one container left, I heat up a single bag's volume of milk (1.3 L) then let it cool. That volume plus the last container dumped in to inoculate the batch makes exactly 8 full containers again. A continuous loop.
For a couple of a years I have been making my own vegan yoghurt by emptying the contents of two probiotic capsules into a litre of organic soy milk, mixing thouroughly, and then letting the milk sit in a yoghurt maker (or a pressure cooker set on the yoghurt program) for 14 hours. The effective working time is less than 5 minutes, and the result is a wonderfully tangy and creamy plantbased yoghurt. It's one of the easiest things you can make in your kitchen — or so I thought until yesterday:
For my own convenience I used a different brand of soy milk, because I thought that organic soy milk was organic soy milk. However, when the incubation periode was over yesterday, the soy milk was still runny — it didn't seem to have coagulated at all. No problem, I gave it 6 hours more (for a total of 20 hours): still runny, and not the slightest sour. WTF?
To exclude the possibility that I — in a fit of distraction — had taken some other capsules from the fridge than the probiotics, I repeated the procedure with a fresh carton of the same brand of soy milk, making sure that I used the probiotics this time. Same result: after 14 hours of “fermentation” the soy milk was still runny and not tangy at all (the taste was just like lukewarm soy milk and it didn't have even the slightest resemblance to yoghurt).
Both brands (we can call them Coop365 and Spir) of soy milk are of the sweetened type with added vanilla flavour. Coop365 (the one I usually use) is made from 8.5% soy beans and has 3.7 g protein per 100 g. Spir is made from 8% soy beans and has 3.2 g protein per 100 g. Both are organic, and both are sweetened with organic cane sugar. Coop365 has a slightly lower salt content than Spir — 1.2‰ vs 1.8‰ — but in such low concentrations it should not have any effects on lactic acid fermentation.
The only real difference between the two soy milks according to the fact box on the cartons is that while Spir contains E418, also known as gellan gum, Coop365 doesn't. Gellan gum is said to be “inert”, and according to the woodchuck book it is often used in “plant-based milks to keep plant protein suspended in the milk”:
Both soy milks coagulate readily when adding a small amount of e.g. lemon juice. According to a page I read yesterday, the curdle point of soy milk is around pH 5.5.
The probiotic capsules that I use contains three different species of lactics: Lactobacillus acidophilus, Bifidobacterium lactis (syn.: B. animalis), and Lactobacillus rhamnosus (syn.: Lacticaseibacillus rhamnosus). All three of them are found/used in dairy products such as fermented milk.
Now my question is simply: Do any of you fedizens have experiential, or otherwise solid, knowledge that E418 is able to inhibit lactic acid fermentation of soy milk as described above? Or, when reading my description, does your experience tell you that “Hey, the Spir didn't ferment because of …!”?
During a visit to a marketplace, looking for local delicacies, I chanced upon this. The translation app said it's "crispy rice crust" , and in the #Philippines , these are never commercially sold, and are the unwanted (?) by-product of cooking rice on a stove.
I need some help with an odd situation that happend with milk in my kitchen. It was heated up to 75°C, then poured into glass flask and the lid was thightened (so no air got in). It was on a desk for around 20 hours, with around 20°C. The milk got thick, bit the taste is identical to milk. So, the texture is yogurt like, but the taste is milky. Any ideas what happened? It didn't get sour... #help#fermentation#milk#yogurt#troubleshooting
Tried making #yogurt for the first time today, it worked! Added three tablespoons of plain Activia yogurt into a bottle (900 ml) of pasteurized whole milk, placed it in a pot filled with warm water, placed under a tap, so that it was easy to add more of warm water as it cooled down. Kept that way for 7 hours, then took it out. It had a bit of liquid (whey), and rather thick yogurt; thicker than the starter, which was a pleasant surprise. Tastes just like the regular Activia, which is also a bit unexpected: I thought it will be somehow more raw, lacking any post-processing.
Temperature control is easy to do with a finger placed in the water with such a setup, but I also used an infrared thermometer (pyrometer) built into a multimeter, which I acquired as a non-contact voltage tester with additional functions less than a year ago: those are handy for both dealing with electrical wiring and culinary experiments. It has a flashlight, too, and was pretty cheap.
Started some yoghurt and also some sauerkraut working over lunch time.
The yoghurt is about timing - remembering to start a batch before we use up the last of the previous batch – need it for culture.
The sauerkraut is just a process of massaging the chopped cabbage with salt and letting it sit for a few days immersed in the resulting liquid to ferment. No extra inoculation needed.
OC 👩🍳👌