The great yogurt experiment

My mother bought me a yogurt maker as a birthday gift (don't worry, I actually asked for one).

About a year ago I discovered almond milk and no longer use cow or goat milk for anything really, except for my morning coffee if I am running around the city and don't have almond milk handy.

I digress, i got the yogurt maker in the hopes of being able to make a delicious almond milk based yogurt. I am on my second trial, the first one failed so i did some additional research and a little more web surfing to see what other experimentalists have been doing.

In my first attempt i used a commercial brand of almond milk and treated it as i would regular cow milk which was a mistake. In this experiment a few missteps i discovered were: 1. i over heated it. 2. i added corn starch. 3. i added maple syrup, the bacteria or culture need something sweet to eat while fermenting while cow milk has tasty things for the bacteria to munch on, non-dairy drinks do not 4. i put the little lids on making it so that condensation was formed.

The outcome? By heating the commercial brand of almond milk to the same temp i would have heated cow milk i changed the chemical composition and it separated, by adding corn starch (i thought it would make it nice and thick) it further aided in the separation. I am not sure about the maple syrup, i think i was actually ok to use that but am still looking into that, oh and i slept through the timer beep and did not get it into the refrigerator fast enough. Long story short i created something that smelled vaguely like yogurt but that is where the similarities end.

Today i decided to give this another shot. Instead of using a commercial almond milk which has additional ingredients that i cannot control i made the almond milk from scratch (it is SO easy!) some people would prefer to have it drained so that it is smooth, but i did not do that because i thought it had a great texture and would really help to give my yogurt good body.
In addition to making the almond milk i also did not heat it, through the process of making the milk it heated it up to approximately 90 degrees and i let it cool down to 80 degrees as directed before putting in the culture. I did not add any aditional thickening agents as i figure i will start with this and proceed from there based on how this batch turns out. I did add honey to the almond milk. currently my little bacteria buddies are munching away on some yummy honey and almonds. I will know tomorrow if it is the right consistency, oh, i also left the little lids off so that the excess water would not form little puddles on in each cup.

If this yogurt is sucessful or at least palatable i will be posting the recipe for those who would want to try it, the one thing i noticed is that there are many MANY people who would like to have an alternative to dairy based yogurt but not necessarily use soy as the replacement. I am in that crowd, i don't like soy and am not sold on the hype that is is truly healthy to have in large amounts, but more on that in another post.

As a last note i am using yogourmet freeze dried yogurt culture, i will be switching to a non-dairy based one once this one runs out, i don't see any reason to be wasteful. It is extremely hard to find non-dairy based culture as it normally is grown in a dairy environment, it is also very expensive, i found a couple of places in the web that sell it, i will be giving it a shot in the future.

Ok, let's keep fingers crossed!!!!

City Mouse