Probiotics What?! - Sous Vide Yogurt

Super cool way to make yogurt!  If you have a sous vide device, of course... 

I mean, who needs probiotics if you actually know what they are? If you eat yogurt at all, or naturally fermented pickles or sauerkraut or any cultured foods, you are getting probiotics in a totally natural way. And yes, that includes yogurt!

I love making homemade yogurt and as you may have guessed from some of my previous posts, I am especially fond of gadgets and cooking tools.

I've used several yogurt making tools in the past but when I moved to Florida, the bottom heating element of my favorite yogurt maker got lost somehow in the move.

No big deal, I thought. As I have my YoLife non electric thermos yogurt maker, I knew I wouldn't really have to do without. My Euro Cuisine yogurt maker was great, but still... just couldn't quite find it justifiable to buy another uni-purpose kitchen tool. Getting more practical in my culinary old age and even more particular when it comes to storing bulky tools in my limited kitchen space. Let's face it, no matter how big your kitchen is, if you love to cook, your space is always limited.

When it comes to making good quality yogurt, it is as simple as this: you must start with good quality yogurt and good quality whole milk. No way around it. And therein lies it's most rewarding feature. You can use virtually ANY good quality yogurt you like as long as it has active yogurt cultures. In fact, reading a label should be quick because it should really only have one ingredient: cultured dairy. Cultured dairy is actually comprised of two ingredients. Dairy (milk or cream) and live active cultures. Often, the active cultures will be explicitly labeled as well.

When choosing yogurt as a starter, I'm a purist in this regard. Not to mention, I'm not a fan of artificial anything... not a fan of preservatives, additives to alter coloring or artificial flavorings of any kind. But that is a personal preference to be sure. I suppose it bears mentioning though, that if you want the benefits of probiotics you need to dispense with the artificial sugars, additives and preservatives, etc. Defeats the purposes of probiotics in the diet, which is to course correct the over indulgence all of us have for processed foods containing sugars and all the bad juju associated with today's modern illnesses, including obesity. Do your gut a favor and go as natural as you can, from time to time.

For the sake of this blog post, I am referring to dairy yogurts made from milk.  I have made other types of non-dairy yogurt for the paleos out there, but really, my heart always comes back to whole milk yogurts.

If your yogurt contains additives or preservatives or flavorings or gelatins or thickening agents like guar gum, etc. just leave it on the shelf... It won't produce a clone of the original product no matter what you do and you may be inclined to think it is harder than it really is or that you've done something wrong.  Trust me on this, you haven't done anything wrong. But for the sake of replicating your favorite yogurt, your yogurt choice matters. After all, who can replicate unnatural manufactured yogurt with an indefinite shelf life? Yogurt is a fresh product and the fewer, natural ingredients involved, the more likely you are to replicate it to perfection... Yogurt is alive. You know you have the right one if it contains 2-3 natural dairy ingredients and ACTIVE or LIVE cultures.

In order to replicate yogurt indefinitely, you need to think of it the same way as you think of other cultured and fermented products. Cultured products need to be fed. Like sourdough... If you've ever worked with sourdough starters, the concept is exactly the same. The culture or starter needs to be fed regularly in order to multiply and culture the newly added fresh ingredients. You add more flour and water to a sourdough starter and the starter feeds on the fresh ingredients, culturing the new ingredients to make more sourdough. If done well, the cultures can live almost indefinitely.

The way this works in yogurt is much the same way.  You take a starter yogurt, such as Dannon whole fat plain yogurt, add fresh whole milk to this and leave it for 12-24 hours to culture the new milk.  That's it.

Well, almost.  The reason there is no finite time is that everyone's environment and kitchen temperature is different. In days of old, yogurt was made by heating yogurt in a thick vessel designed to retain the heat and then left overnight or up to a day to culture.

The reason for this, and I won't go into extraordinary detail (or I guess I already have :) is because yogurt is a mesophilic culture. What does that mean??? Well, it means it cultures at a medium temperature range, which means a yogurt culture must be kept at 110 degrees during the culturing process.

That is what these high priced and lower end yogurt makers do... they maintain a constant temperature for the culturing yogurt. Nothing more or less. If you want to make a lot of yogurt, you need a big vessel or large yogurt making appliance. If you do just a pint at a time, a smaller tool will do the trick or you can do it the old fashioned way as well.

BUT... if you have a sous vide device, you can do so much more than just make yogurt!! Not only can you make incredible steaks, soups, eggs, sauces, fish, etc... but you can make as little or as much yogurt as you want!

Here's what you need:
Fresh cultured whole fat plain yogurt
Fresh whole fat milk
Sous vide device (110 degrees F, 12 hours)
Jar or glass container with a fitted lid

There is no special ratio of yogurt to milk, or maybe there is, but in my experience it is very forgiving. What is important is to have active live cultures in your yogurt and fresh whole milk. You can absolutely use percent or low fat or skim milk, but to make your new starter, I recommend whole milk. It makes a thicker, luscious product that sets up so nicely. But do what you must.... I'm never one to stick with the rules either. :)

As a guide:
1-2 tbsp yogurt to 1 cup of milk

Or for someone that doesn't mess around:
1-2 cups yogurt to 1 half gallon (64 oz) of milk

Now if those ratios don't quite equal each other, I send love and apologies as the Pioneer woman likes to say. I send love and apologies to her for stealing that line because I love it so much.

I use whatever vessel I'm going to use to store it in to finish the process. To me, that is absolutely a large 1/2 gallon mason jar from Amazon. (These work beautifully for the broccoli and cauliflower soups as well as the Oyster stew my Florida boy loves to make.) I also have a vacuum sealer with the jar attachment that I use to seal the jars prior to putting in the sous vide water bath. But hey, if you know you will be eating it right away, why bother vacuum sealing it, right? Me, I will make a couple of these at a time.

Method:
Add your yogurt culture to the jar, followed by the milk and shake with the lid on or stir very well to incorporate the yogurt with the milk. If you see yogurt settling on the bottom of the jar, keep going. You want it well distributed.

Sous-viding (yep just made that up!):
Start your large sous vide bath and set the timer for 12 hours with a temp of 110 degrees F. At a constant, precision controlled temperature, you can almost certainly reproduce consistent results in a consistent time frame if you ensure that you started with enough cultured yogurt for the amount of milk you use. In this case, overachieving is better than underachieving and by that I mean, when in doubt, use more yogurt in your ratio than using less. You won't hurt it by using too much but it may take longer to culture if you use too little. How do you know? Well, it will set up and look fairly solid, not liquid-y. And you will see it jiggle in the jar. So scientific, huh? Haha.

Yogurt styles:
Do it a few times and you will get the hang of it.  And guess what? If you like Greek yogurt, start with Greek yogurt. Just follow the guideline I provided: whole fat plain Greek yogurt, no additives or preservatives of any kind, including sugars or sweeteners. Greek yogurts are a different culture than say, American style yogurts. If you like Lebanese yogurt, use that. Indian yogurt? Use that. Use what you love as long as it fits the bill.

Yogurt Flavoring:
And if you want a Greek honey yogurt or flavoring of any kind, just wait until you make the yogurt and it is refrigerated.  This is the finished product. You can flavor the finished product with whatever in the world floats your boat. Fruit or berries, sweeteners like honey or agave or organic sugars or you can even do savory flavorings.... Can you say Tzatziki? Neither can I but I sure do love Tzatziki.

**And just in case you weren't sure, yes, you do need to refrigerate your yogurt once you are done.

Pickle Peppers in a Kimchi Jar!

My hubby's million dollar secret... Revealed.  Need I say more?  Oh, ok. Let me explain...

This is an experiment pickling smaller batches of peppers using my nifty Kimchi pickling jar.  For those of you who have never made Kimchi before, I will write a post or maybe several, about this topic, but for now, let's discuss how to make your own Tabasco hot sauce.

For years, my hubby and I have grown the hottest peppers on the planet, long before it was posh or cool or hip to eat hot foods. I'm a Southern girl, raised on Tabasco.

My first garden here in Minnesota had 45 varieties of peppers growing in it and nothing else...  My husband came to love the really really hot stuff after we started growing peppers on his apartment balcony when we were first dating. The rest is hot sauce history.

I have posted the "recipe" for making pickled peppers the old fashioned way, using a Gartopf fermentation crock.  However, I wanted to show you this way of doing it, too. The Kimchi jar was perfect!  Not only did it allow us to make a smaller batch of hot sauce but we could also see the fermentation in action, which is kinda cool.

As is the case with the Gartopf crock, this jar has a "cup" on top of the mouth of the jar and a wide rim on the well which holds water to create a seal. The seal keeps critters and dust out while still allowing the jar to burp and gurgle to release the gases as the peppers begin to ferment.

The pickling liquid will also go from crystal clear to a milky, cloudy pickling liquid and this is your sign that fermentation has happened and may need to be slowed down. To slow it down, put this little jar in the fridge. This slows down the fermentation process and I find that the refrigeration step also allows the real tang to develop.

Of course you can eat these little devils just like they are. And we do. But another way we enjoy this bounty is by juicing the whole batch and making hot sauce.  This is the trick to making a good hot sauce. You can blend, puree, mash the peppers but juicing them gives you the consistency of real hot sauce and also helps to keep the sauce homogenized. In other words, the sauce won't separate as easily if you put them through the juicer.

As a precaution, we use clean and sterilized herbal supplement bottles (which are quite small and very appropriate) fitted with medicine drippers. This allows hot sauce lovers to drizzle the sauce drop by drop on their food instead of pouring it out of a bottle which can end in trauma if you pour too much. This method, which my hubby thought of, is the most perfect way of doing it I've ever seen.  :)  

Gartopf Fermented Pickles

This is my 10L Gartopf fermenting crock. I've been using these now for several years after doing research and learning that these are the traditional vessels used for making sauerkraut and pickles in Germany and Austria.  I'm sure any old ceramic crock will do and I am antiquing around town in order to locate some of the awesome local crocks from Red Wing, but until then, these are my go-tos. They are sturdy, steady and quite heavy so keep that in mind if you do decide to start pickling this way. 

The nice thing about these crocks is that their lids are specially designed to let the gases escape and of course, since they are covered, bacteria can't get in.  The deep well on the outside is filled with water once the lid is in place and a little hole or gasket that sits above the water line releases any excess gas while the fermentation is in full swing. 

Fatalii, Red Congos, Purira, Punjab, White Habanero
Jalapeno Chili Peppers

If I had to guess, I would say this was around 7 or 8 lbs of homegrown very fresh peppers, picked from our pepper plants that same day.  From here you add the fresh peppers to the crock above and I admit this one is a little full so they will have to be pressed down somewhat so that the stone weights, which the vessels come with, will fit in and keep the peppers submerged in the pickling brine. This is extremely important if you do not want your peppers to rot. That can happen when the peppers are allowed to float on top of the brine and then, you run the risk of spoiling the whole batch.

We put the stones in top, then pour the pickling liquid in so that it covers the stones completely. Put the lid on top and wait about six weeks for the fermentation to stop. The vessel will start "burping" almost immediately so if you smell something funny, don't blame your neighbor, they didn't do it, honest. :)

The standard pickling brine I use for cucumber pickles and pickled peppers is the following:

• 2 cups warm water, not hot
• 2 tbsp white vinegar (I love fancy, but not here, this needs to be standard white vinegar)
• 1 tbsp kosher salt

Repeat this exact measurement as many times as you need to completely cover the stones and peppers. My 10L needs about 6 repeats and 5L about 5. Don't ask me why, doesn't make sense to me why you don't need twice as much for the 10L but I have repeated this enough times to know that you need one more batch more than the 5L, usually.

Shocked? So was I.  But this is the perfect ratio for creating a natural pickling brine that isn't overloaded with vinegar or salt. It will work, trust me. The pickle flavor or the acid you are looking for will be there, I assure you, but it will develop naturally and allow you to store these pickles without hot packing BUT you will need to refrigerate them temporarily to stop the fermentation process. I learned this the hard way when a bottle of recent hot sauce nearly exploded at the kitchen table because we forgot to put it back in the refrigerator just after bottling it.  We put our hot sauce in medicinal dripper bottles because the dropper is the perfect way to distribute really, really hot sauce in moderation. Well, the rubber dropper on top turned into a big round bulbous balloon that was funny at first.

In an attempt to alleviate the pressure, hubby wanted to put it in the fridge. Due to recent events in which other things blew up my fridge, I was a little wary of this idea and insisted he put it outside where temperatures were already quite nippy.  Well, as you might expect during the day, the temps climbed and we forgot to take it back in. It alerted us by exploding with such a force that it literally shot hot sauce to the soffits of our roof, much to my dismay. Alas, putting it in the fridge may have been more prudent but don't tell him that.... :)

After these are done, we take them out of the brine then run it all through a juicer and the hot sauce will surprise you. Of course, you can also pack them into jars to brighten the day when the mood strikes if pickled peppers is more your thing. Just be careful and do your homework so you know exactly how to process fermented food as I'm still a novice (no? really??) myself. Experiment but arm yourself with a bit of google research so I don't lead you astray. But, above all, have fun!