A Yoghurt Synthesis

Recipe time on Muscleguy’s blog. When I was back in NZ visiting my mother she served me some home made yoghurt with stewed plums. Not wishing to offend I had to have some, but I was most pleasantly surprised it was creamy, delicious and flavourful. I quizzed her on the method and was introduced to the EasyYo system which is very simple (and invented in NZ). You dissolve one of the starter sachets in water in one of their 1kg containers. Fit the red baffle in their big white thermos and fill to the top of the baffle with boiling water. Insert the yoghurt container, put the lid on then wait 8-9 hours and you have lovely yoghurt. There’s a variety of flavours and styles available too. Around here Holland&Barrett and an independent kitchenware shop sell them.

However there are two problems with it. The first is cost. Sachets cost around £2.70, they make a full 1kg of yoghurt which lasts 2 weeks in the fridge, but. The second is that as I’m lactose intolerant I found I only barely  tolerated it. Proper yoghurt should have very little lactose, the bacteria should have converted it to lactate (which is why yoghurt tastes sour, pleasantly so). Commercial yoghurts add milk powder to make them thicker but still be able to put just ‘milk’ on the ingredients list, especially the low fat ones but I suspect most of them. There’s a lot of milk powder needless to say in an EasyYo sachet. I needed a way to both cut the cost and lower the lactose.

In searching the web for online sources of the equipment I came across a website which detailed a way to start with milk and just use a proportion of the sachet as a starter culture, resealing the sachet for next time. Great I thought and proceeded to try it. The result was quite good, though not very well tolerated by me and not being in possession of a wide mouthed thermos, hard to get out of it. Not wanting to buy a 1 litre wide mouthed thermos and having the EasyYo gear and needing to lower the lactose all combined to a necessity which gave birth to invention. A synthesis of the two methods, and very low lactose to boot. Here it is: