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The REAL yogurt recipe

This is the long version, which I should have posted months ago and didn’t realize was missing from the website.

Ingredients:

- milk (whole is yummiest, but you can use any real milk – from cows, goats, sheep, buffalo, you get the idea)
- yogurt (choose your favorite texture and flavor, because your yogurt will take on these characteristics, too)
(YES, it’s that simple!)

Instructions

1. Heat the milk. To kill off any bad bacteria, and to break apart the casein proteins in the milk so the yogurt will gel more easily, boil the mill until it foams and rises. To retain the complete enzymes and bacteria of raw milk, heat the milk to your desired temperature. Remove from heat.

2. Let milk cool until it reaches 120°F. I use my fingers – when I can stick my fingers in the milk for 2-3 seconds until it’s too hot, then it’s ready. Inoculate the milk with live active cultures. This means, mix in about 2 T of yogurt for each quart of milk. Mix a small amount of milk with the yogurt, whisk well to remove any lumps, and then stir this yogurt mixture back into the warm milk.

3. Pour this inoculated milk into your incubating container. This should be some sort of glass or ceramic container with a top – it is not necessary for the top to be airtight, so you can simply set a plate over the top of a bowl if you like.

4. Incubate the yogurt at 105-110°F for 6-10 hours. The longer you incubate your yogurt, the thicker and more tangy it will become. Keep the temperature as consistent as possible during this time, and try not to jostle the yogurt. There are lots of methods of incubation, and it may take some time to find the best one for your lifestyle and environment, but here are some ideas:

Wrap your yogurt in dish towels and place over the pilot light of your stove.
Heat hot water, pour it into a cooler, place yogurt in the hot water, and close the top of the cooler.
Wrap the yogurt in an electric blanket or heating pad.
Heat a pizza stone, place it in a warm oven, put your yogurt in, and close the door to retain the heat.
During the summer, it may be possible to make yogurt by just leaving the jar on the kitchen counter, perhaps in the sun, for longer than 10 hours. Be patient – I have met a few people on this trip who incubate their yogurt at a lower temperature for 24-48 hours.

5. Once your yogurt has reached its desired consistency, place it in the refrigerator and keep it chilled for a couple of weeks. It will leak whey and become more sour as the days pass, but that doesn’t mean it’s gone bad.

6. To learn about straining yogurt, read this post.

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Categories About, Recipes

Changing goals and reflections

29 Aug

This weekend in Indianapolis marks the halfway point of the Yogurt Pedaler trip. I’ve ridden about 400 miles, and I’ve visited two farms and two farmers markets. I’ve learned a lot, and the project has evolved in many ways.

One key lesson has been the real, inescapable prevalence of corn and soybeans to the agricultural – and physical – landscape of these two states. When this project was born, I had dreams of biking from farm to farm, learning about one farm from another and building my route as the days passed. Luckily, I decided to plan a little more – there really aren’t enough dairy farms to fly by the seat of my pants and make any real progress – but I keep finding out about great people and places a day or two after I visit them. And I’m certainly still building my route as the days pass.

Another key discovery has been that milk and yogurt are really heavy. As are a big glass jar, ice, and a cooler. Halfway through week two, after a couple of days of incessant headwinds, I seriously considered leaving my yogurt-making supplies in Indy and continuing on my way purely as a documentarian and yogurt ambassador. I was forbidden to give tastes of my yogurt to curious passersby at markets in both Urbana and Indianapolis – as the law states, to be fair – but it’s frustrating to make a big jar of yogurt and only be able to point to it when people wonder how it turns out, then toss it down the drain after hauling it around all weekend.

But the essential missions of the Yogurt Pedaler have also become much clearer to me on the road. The project is about getting people excited about making things, and it’s hard to do that if I am not even making yogurt. Sure, it’s about visiting the farms, but it’s also about getting to know the farmers and the animals and the products that are produced. I’ve tasted Kilgus ice cream, and I’ve tasted Traderspoint ice cream, and they are two completely different products from two completely different farms.

I’m sure I’ll visit even more diverse farms – but even visiting these two has made me ask lots of questions about the missions of these “sustainable” dairies, whether third generation and newly grass-fed like Kilgus, or new organic farms with missions that far surpass producing dairy products, like Traderspoint.

Kilgus is a third generation farm, but only recently did they refocus their market to the grass-fed, bottled-on-site niche. They’ve always been a responsible dairy, but this change in marketing has meant their survival, now that restaurants and speciality shops in Chicago are drawn to their product for its unique appeal.

Traderspoint, on the other hand, was founded in 2003 by a couple whose background and startup capital are found far from dairy farming. Their operation is beautiful, their herd of Brown Swiss is attractive and healthy, and their farm is bustling with activity from visitors to the farm, customers at the shop, and diners at their restaurant. Their marketing is so successful, spreading demand for “Fresh. Simple. Organic.” dairy nationwide, that they’ve had to bring in milk from other organic, grass-fed dairies to produce enough product to sell. They’ve done wonders for the organic movement, which I support and am frustrated by in equal measure.

The inescapable fact of the comparison I have just described is that the economic position of Traderspoint’s owners (they inherited the land, he is a plastic surgeon) allows more publicity and a greater reach of the message and products from grass-fed, sustainable, healthy food. But what are the real advantages of marketing over a family farm like Kilgus, with deep roots in the community, and with wisdom and a connection to the land and a way of life that is truly entrenched in the region’s economies and social networks? Would Kilgus be aided by investment in marketing to the higher-profile niche to which Traderspoint’s customers largely belong? Or by going organic? Or would they lose a valuable local connection, one that they have relied on and which has supported the dairy for decades?

As I ate lunch before leaving Traderspoint on Friday, I overheard Fritz Coons, one of the owners, say to a potential product supplier that their desire was to “express the brand through glass.” This gets at the essential difference I’ve been expressing here – through words and pictures – and I’ve become comfortable with the two dairies in their own ways and niches. I am attracted to Kilgus’ community connection at such a heartwarming level, and I truly believe it’s important to furthering American culture’s agricultural foundations. But I’m also convinced that what Traderspoint is doing to advance the “Organic” movement in this country, while I’m incredibly frustrated by its class limitations, is important to creating healthier and more balanced food systems. There is no perfect dairy, and I hope I continue to discover diverse models in the coming weeks, but these two welcoming places have provided me with plenty of calcium-rich food for thought.

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Categories About

Street life

26 Aug

One of the goals of this project is to encourage street life, and it’s something I feel very strongly about but which often gets overlooked in posts about headwinds and cows. So I will dedicate a post to just that – why I love street food and want to see more people out on the streets in their towns and cities.

Riding the ferry in Istanbul is the setting of one of the best “meals” possible, anywhere in the world:

On a glorious spring day, buy a simit (a sort of crunchy sesame bagel) and a packet of cream cheese from one of the dozen vendors yelling “Simiiiiiit!!! Buyurun!!” outside the ferry dock. Once on the ferry, choose a seat outside – my favorite is along the side, on the benches where you can put your feet up on the side of the boat, just feet from the water splashing up in the wake. Then, buy a glass of tea, served in real glass glasses, with a spoon and a lump of sugar. There is really no better way to experience Istanbul than eating a simit and drinking a glass of tea surrounded by others crossing the Bosporus for myriad other purposes.

Eating outside is the first essential part of my love for street life and street food. The best meals are often summer feasts at a restaurant with a beautiful terrace on a busy pedestrian street, but they are also just as often picnics in the park with nothing more than a watermelon and a good hunk of cheese. Simply being outside during a meal makes me feel like I am experiencing my environment completely. More important , however, is the inexplicable joy I find in eating outside — when the trees and fireflies and passing neighbors and friends are invited to partake in the feast of the senses.

Then there’s the element of those passing neighbors and friends. I’m riding my bike through the Midwest right now, and I’m meeting so many amazing people. Without these new friends and acquaintances – even the fleeting ones who question my destination or purpose in the parking lot of the library or gas station – I would most certainly have given up by now. It is for these people that I battle the headwinds and creep painfully up the hills, because my goals are always to inspire curiosity and communion with our environments. And by “environment” I don’t mean the trees and rivers and smog-filled air, although that’s a part of it. I also mean the human and built environments; who are our neighbors? How can they support us, challenge us, make us laugh? What are these streets and buildings that we live in? What stories have they seen, what events will they stage, what actions do they encourage, and what character do they lend to our communities?

Without populating these environments, and engaging others in them, we can never truly know the answers to these questions.

Holly Whyte wrote in The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, “If you want to seed a place with activity, put out food…Food attracts people who attract more people.” And this is why I am so passionate about the Yogurt Pedaler inspiring street life; because bringing people together on the street, over food, is the best way to inspire new encounters with neighbors and visitors, to discover new uses for our built environment, new ways for cities to create spaces that nurture the people and businesses and homes that communities so need in order to survive and flourish.

We all recognize the spaces we love in our towns – they’re not parking lots, or tiny sidewalks next to busy roads, or dirty alleyways. Perhaps they’re tree-lined residential streets where children play on sidewalks and neighbors mingle on front porches. Or busy urban plazas where businessmen and tourists eat lunch, and perhaps there’s a concert in the evening. They’re neighborhoods where friends meet at the local coffeeshop, ramble down the street to the park, or up the block to the bookstore, and can buy their groceries or visit the post office along the way. They’re places where people feel safe, because they are familiar with the landscape, because there are other people around, and because there are spaces to do the things we like best. And doesn’t everyone love to eat?

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Categories About, On the street

Chambana press!!

25 Aug

Thanks guys!

I met two great yogurt fans outside of the post office in Champaign, and I just got a link to their blog, where they posted a freecrappyportrait of me. Check it out!

Also, one of my hosts Kelly is a writer for the Champaign-Urbana independent online newspaper, Smile Politely, and he wrote a great piece about the Yogurt Pedaler.
Check it out here.
Thanks, Smile Politely, Kelly and Emily, and all the folks at the Bike Project.

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Categories About

A celebration and an appeal to readers

25 Aug

First, the celebration. I would like to propose a toast – of electrolyte drink, your choice of flavor – to public libraries! Since much of this tour has been about updating readers on this website, I’ve taken full advantage of the libraries in towns that I’ve passed, and I’ve been very impressed. Champaign’s two-year-old library was grand and shiny and new, and their wireless was great. The Urbana Free Library has a fantastic stone porch on the east side, shaded by flowers and trees and an awning, and I sat for hours at the tables and chairs scattered outside the cafe. Today I visited two libraries – Danville’s was easily the highlight of the town, and I hope residents take advantage of it more than they do the other old, vacant buildings I passed. But Covington, Indiana, wins my prize for most picturesque library. Nestled on a tree-lined street corner a couple of blocks from the main square, its huge stone steps were the perfect place to send that forgotten email, and there was a steady stream of people filing in and out the door, despite Covington being a remarkably small town.

Next, the call to arms. I am sure some of you readers are practiced at yoga, and I would like your advice. What are your favorite poses or stretches that will ease the tension in my neck and back, strengthen my shoulders and abs, and stretch out my hips and knees without straining them? At the end of the day, and the beginning, I yearn for a peaceful balance and strength and flexibility that my volleyball stretches are just not getting me.