Ask Allie!
Ask Allie is our food-related advice column, where you can ask all your fermenting, cooking, baking, and pantry-related questions to get digestible answers! No question about food is off limits!
Most of you will receive an emailed reply prior to your question hitting the blog, since I frequently think you need a more immediate answer. You should anticipate 1-2 weeks between submitting your question and its appearance on blog. Although emailed replies normally take between 1-3 days, it can take up to a week.
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I recently made a batch of yogurt with greek starter that I had in the fridge for about 3 weeks without making yogurt in between. (previously had been making yogurt usually every 7 to 10 days, but things got busy and here we are 3 weeks later). The resulting yogurt tastes off - not necessarily like spoiled dairy, but weird. It has a definite alcoholic taste and it's well, funky. I am assuming there is some yeast happening, but just want to see if there is a way to salvage with subsequent culturing or do I need to toss and start again with new culture? Previous batches had been fabulous. Thanks so much!
— Lisa
Hey Lisa! Dairy cultures all continue to ferment in the fridge, so what’s happened is that yours is fermented past the point of being palatable. That said, it will still culture your next batch and will normalize w/in 1-2 batches. The rest of the yogurt I would use to make mashed potatoes, because grosser tasting yogurts really do make the best mash. I just put up a recipe for potato knishes in the blog on our site, so if you’re feeling some hand pies, a recipe that uses funky yogurt is available. There’s also one for colcannon up there.
This happens to me a lot, also, if I don’t put the jar in the freezer once I realize it won’t be used “on time.” It’s not ideal, but as long as it doesn’t become a routine situation your yogurt will be fine (if it becomes routine, you may weaken or kill the culture). That’s another thing you can do, if you know it’s not going to pan the way you meant it to: freeze your yogurt! The texture thawed will be a bit more runny, but it can still be used normally for eating, cooking/baking, and reculturing.
Hi, I just got my yogurt start and am eager to get it culturing. My question is how do dry and save a start down the road?
— Bunches of you
To dry it, you just spread it thinly on parchment paper or on a plastic bowl/plate. I favor the plastic because they were already in my house and there’s less waste this way (parchment paper is incredibly unfriendly to the environment, in most cases). You can let it air dry, or, if it’s very humid where you live, let it dry in the fridge. What I recommend, though, is saving wet cultures instead of dry. With a wet culture in the freezer, you don’t have to activate it again, but rather use it to reculture as though it were fresh. When you dry it, you still have to store it in the freezer (and it still only has a 1-year expected shelf life, even though in practice that’s generally not really true) and you have to activate it again as though it was a brand new yogurt. So fresh samples are easier for you in the long run. I prefer Target’s Up&Up brand breast milk bags for this. In my experience, they work the best because they’re actually designed for long-term storage of dairy, and they also work really well for sauces and other small quantities of foods you need or want to freeze flat.
Make sure you take 2 samples, also. I have had situations where I messed up and added a backup to the heated milk before it cooled, causing me to get the second backup out. Redundancy here, as with everywhere, is key.
I have two questions.
1. When one is using live probiotic yogurt, how can one be sure that they friendly bacteria actually enter the gut without being killed in the stomach.
2. How can one prevent cross-contamination if one has different cultures in the house (different yogurt cultures, kefir, sourdough etc.)
Thank you so much for your help.
— John
Great questions, John!
You can’t. The only culture that research indicates will actually colonize your gut biome instead of acting as a transitory probiotic is milk kefir. All the others do pass through the digestive system. What happens, however, is that while it’s passing through, it’s setting up the conditions for beneficial microbes to set up shop and produce a fuller, more productive gut biome. If it’s of paramount importance to you that your culture contains colonizing microbes specifically, you want to stick with milk kefir instead of yogurt. Otherwise, you’re still getting the longer-term benefits of the probiotics but without the direct colonization of your biome.
Ideally, they’ll socially distance. This is basically the same as CDC recommendations, where you give them 6’ of breathing room. The lids, where permissible (not permissible with kombucha, jun, or vinegar), function as the masks by primarily benefiting (a word I deeply but erroneously believe should have two t’s) the other cultures instead of the cultures that are “wearing” them. Kefir specifically is insidious and likes to get around. This one is your COVID-19 because it is going to colonize everything it can. Unlike COVID, this benefits you because it often offers up some amazing Franken-Yogurts as a result! Tight lid when in the fridge will usually (but not always) prevent that. Keeping them in fermenting jars that hermetically seal will always prevent it. I like Kilner the best, but Fido and Weck tend to be more readily available in the States and are excellent choices. In my experience, sourdough never gets colonized by anything, though others may have differing experiences. Yogurt will suck in as many extras as it can, so those are the primary cultures you need to be concerned about between yogurt, kefir, and sourdough. If you are doing kombucha, that also likes to get around and can’t ferment with a lid, so this is the one you need to be most careful with within the unmasked context.
