Wild yogurt culture from Jalapeños
Reading Katz’s The Art of Fermentation inspired me to try to make yogurt from a wild culture. It worked. The details:
Cut the stems from 10 jalapeños, as chile stems reportedly harbor lacto bacteria.
Heated a quart of ultra high temp (UHT) pasteurized skim milk (mistake) to 190° F, then cooled it to 110° F. I added the stems and put the milk-stem mix in a 105° F sous vide bath for 12 hours. After 12 hours, the UHT milk had not thickened, but I suspected that the culture had grown none the less.
Next, I heated a quart of low temp pasteurized whole milk to 190°, cooled it to 105°, and added about a cup of the previous culture. This mixture sat in a 105° bath for 12 hours and made fantastic yogurt. I strained the yogurt and kept some whey to start the next batch.
I repeated the process with another quart of whole, low temp milk. More great yogurt. I mixed the previous whey with the new whey and kept a portion.
Repeated the process for a gallon of whole, low temp milk and got a bjt less than a half-gallon of (strained) Greek yogurt. So this is generation 3 or 4 with this culture. I’m interested to see for how many generations this will work.
Some preemptive responses:
-I’m using “yogurt” in the sense of the OED definition and the definition used for the thousands of years before Pasteur. I’m happy with a wild fermentation.
- I forgot that UHT milk won’t curdle, so screwed up in using UHT first. I didn’t do that on purpose, but the culture clearly grew sufficiently to support the next generation of yogurt. Had I used low temp milk to start I’d have had good yogurt the first time around.
-there was a noticeable chile flavor in the UHT culture and the first generation of actual yogurt (gen 2). In the second quart of yogurt there was no such taste.
Edit to define UHT.