Ask Allie!
Ask Allie is our advice column, where you can ask all your food-related questions to get digestible answers! No question is off limits!
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Is the coconut starter not recommended for bread or buns? And how long does it take before you have a loaf from start to finish?
— Margaret
No, it’s fine. I haven’t played with the coconut much yet, but be aware that it absorbs about 5x its weight in water. You will need far less flour than you’d normally think you do for a purely coconut loaf. How long it takes depends on how you’re making the loaf. Some people do fairly short rises, others very long, and how it’s shaped, how much dough there is, etc. will impact the start-to-finish time. I personally never expect less than a 3-hour tour if I’m baking bread, whether that’s sourdough or commercial yeast. If I get it done faster, that’s a bonus! Also, if you don’t have time to babysit a dough while it’s rising, you can do it in the fridge. It takes longer, but dough should last up to 4-5 days in the fridge before it begins enzymatic breakdown.
Hello Allie,
Is it possible to use mesophilic dairy-based starter culture to make non dairy yogurt?
My vegan yogurt starter culture does not seem to work as it advertises.
Thank you.
— Minh
Yes, but you may need to add stabilizers.
Could you explain to me how you made it, as though I’d never done it before? The more detail you can provide, the easier it will be for me to figure out what went wrong for you with the coconut starter.
Mihn said:
I activate my coconut starter with soymilk instead of coconut milk. I waited for 12 hours and nothing seemed to happen. The milk tasted just like its original state.
I just bought another starter. This time I will use whole coconut milk without any additive and see how it goes.
If the culture is successfully activated, do you think I should use certain portion of coconut milk if I want to make yogurt with other plant-based milk?
Okay, so what’s gone wrong is that you didn’t follow the activation directions. That starter ONLY works with coconut cream (like the stuff in the can) and should be diluted to the proper texture with the water from the can. It will not thicken beyond the texture you set it at, and it’s not meant for regular coconut milk or other vegan milks. That’s why it has its own set of activation instructions, because it doesn’t work if you don’t follow the instructions. I would not adulterate this with other vegan milks at all, unless you also intend to add stablizers to it.
After activation, can I make with other plant-based milk like soymilk or does it only work with coconut milk ?
During our conversation, I found out that I probably forgot Sabrina telling me she’d worked out methods for this yogurt to be used with other plant-based milks once the activation is done. Or maybe I wasn’t listening? Not sure how I missed that, but I did. The remainder of the answer to Minh’s question follows:
Sabrina says that what you’re basically doing with the coconut cream is maintaining a mother culture effectively the same way you would with raw milk, per our raw milk guide, but with modifications. So what you do here is make the coconut cream “mother culture” as often as you need to, and you use a double portion of that with other alternative milks so you can ferment them without added stabilizers. So that would generally be 2 tablespoons of coconut cream mother culture for each cup of milk.
Allie, can I ask what is the origin of the cultures? how do you create them and why don't you test them for strains?
— Lena
We don’t create the vast majority of our yogurts, but rather source heirloom cultures from the cultures/nations they come from. We don’t test them, because in order to guarantee that this or that bacteria is in a given culture in the specific packet you might be holding in your hand, we would have to test every single batch. That is cost prohibitive, so it’s not a service we’re able to offer without passing that cost onto our community members. We instead feel that it’s reasonable to tell people that we don’t test, but that we assume the strains relevant to the given culture are present in the expected combination. As far as I know, it’s only big yogurt companies that can state with certainty that this or that is in a given batch. If they state it with certainty and didn’t test, they’re breaking laws about what is and isn’t permitted on labels under various circumstances. We don’t want to do that, and we also like to save y’all money by not increasing prices to cover expensive, regular testing.
