As a lot of my regular followers will know I cook without dairy, wheat, gluten, eggs and nuts, and one of my biggest experiments over the last 2 months has been soya yoghurt.
First of all I perfected the timings in my slow cooker as I dont own a yoghurt maker, 15 mins on 1 hr off seems to be the optimal timing so its neither too warm and kills it or too cold and the culture does not grow.
Next I tried differing milks, different soya ones, rice and oat - neither of which work, as you can see here
Home made soya milk has a tendency to separate when I try to make it into yoghurt, I did find using half shop bought half home made works well. But then it defeats the purpose of having a milk maker.
Shop bought milk had thickeners, stabilisers and sugars added. So through trial and error and error I have worked out if I add 1 tablespoon of agar flakes to 2 litres of milk it is enough to stop it separating as you can see here, but not enough to affect culture growth or taste/texture to any extent.
Next I experimented with sugars. Have tried honey, sugar substitutes, white sugar, brown sugar, as yoghurt culture needs sugar to feed on. none of which really had much effect on the overall outcome of the finished product at all. Then - one of the things I have been sent this month from Healthy Supplies was coconut sugar, and boy oh boy what a difference this makes.
look - the spoon stands it the yoghurt goes much thicker, though admittedly this was half and half milk.
So having discovered this I tried 1litre of home made milk with 1/2 tablespoon of agar flakes and half a tablespoon of coconut sugar and I am over the moon with the outcome.
It has a very slight brown colouring to the finished product but to be honest with you I don't know if I can improve on this, or even if I need to.
Can make 2 litres of yoghurt, giving a yield of twelve normal size pots, from home made milk for change out of 25p, and to be honest cant even buy one yoghurt for that price.
So 10 weeks of trial and error, with some wasted batches, has finally paid off and given me a perfectly acceptable, very palatable natural yoghurt that I am more than happy to eat.
The only thing I have been buying has been the culture I use as a starter, as it gives a level playing field to my experiments, at least then the culture has been acceptable and I know it was never that they made an experiment fail., but maybe next week I will see what happens when I use some home made culture to make more home made now I have a good product to start with.
Will keep you posted.
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