Yogurt II, The Revenge of Yogurt

Further reading on yogurt educated me that possible sources of my inconsistent results include: insufficient sanitation, excessively low culture temperature, using ultra-pasteurized milk, poor control over culturing temperature, not cooling the milk rapidly, excessive culturing time, failure to adequately distribute the starter in the substrate, and a bad attitude.
Today I altered the method:
Heat 0.5 gallon of regular 2% pasteurized milk to 180 F, cool in a water bath to 125 deg. Mix 0.5c milk with 0.25c yogurt then stir into the warm milk. Pour into a sanitized (I use Star San, which is a brewing sanitizer available at your neighborhood brew supply store; you could also boil stuff) vessel and transfer to an insulated picnic cooler. Add 1 gallon water to the container at 130 F (final target is 122 F). Wait 3 hours while thinking about kittens. I maintained laboratory sanitation this time to reduce the chances for competing bacteria to invade my culture. This included sterilization of every single utensil that contacted the milk.
Results: keffir II. Damn.
Plan: change yogurt brands, lower the temperature slightly for the culture.
I used to just do this on the counter with consistent success. Really.

Raw tortilla chips

I guess I missed the part that said "36 hours dehydration" because I kept acting surprised when these weren't done after 8 then 12 then 24 hours.


In any case, mix in a food processor: corn, olive oil, water, salt, ground flax seed, jalapenos, honey, and cilantro. Spread and dehydrate at 115F for 36 hours.


I went a little crazy on the cilantro but otherwise they're good, if calorie dense. The thinner bits do have the texture of a tortilla chip.

Butter

This is another new product for me but the process seemed easy. There isn't much of a cost savings from doing it this way but the quality is better, you get buttermilk as a by-product, you know what's in the butter, and it's cool.

Let the cream sit at room temperature for about 6 hours.
Whip it until the solids separate from the liquids. Strain off the liquid buttermilk and save. Add cold water to the solids, mix together, then dump the water. Repeat until the water runs clear. The rinsing step improves the storage stability of the butter by removing residual flora that reside in the liquid phase. Squeeze the water out, mold as desired, and eat.

Yield today for 1 pt of cream was 6.0 oz butter and roughly 6 oz of buttermilk. The residual weight is lost in rinsing and solids sticking to tools. I just drank the buttermilk. It was worth the effort in itself. Maybe I should have called the butter a by-product.

Beer serving temperatures

Because we're trying to have a civilization here.

Bagels (teaser)

Shin Shin started these yesterday then boiled and baked this morning. We'll get the whole process in next time.

Corn syrup by the inch

http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1824402_1824398_1824388,00.html

Yogurt

The nice thing about this is that yogurt made at home takes about 5 minutes of direct effort and costs about 25% as much as pre-fabricated yogurt. You can buy a starter culture:
http://www.cheesemaking.com/
or you can just buy some yogurt with live cultures:









Heat the milk to 180 F, cool it to 110 F, add 2T of yogurt per quart of milk, keep warm for 5-7 hours. Save some of each batch as starter for the next.






Or at least that's how it usually works. This batch was a yogurt fail despite using the appropriate method. I used different milk and different starter yogurt than I usually use. I can't identify the culprit. We're pretending I was trying to make keffir and was completely successful. It's the best keffir I've ever made.