Ask Allie
What is “Ask Allie”?
Ask Allie is our fermenting-related advice column, where you can ask all your fermenting-related questions and get digestible answers! No question about fermenting is off limits!
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Hi! I do not use milk, I am allergic. really want yogurt with vegetable milk. what culture can you make yogurt with vegetable milk. thank you in advance
— Gulzhan
It sounds to me like you’re really itching to make some yogurt! We offer a coconut yogurt that is vegan, and you can also use milk kefir produced with vegan milks and date paste.
Do you recommend using rennet when making short Thermophilic skyr?
I so that traditional skyr uses rennet to get a firmer texture.
— Daniel
I leave it up to you. Technically, skyr is a cheese, so it should have rennet added. That said, we do make ours as a soured milk/yogurt, so you don’t have to. If you do want to do rennet, though, here’s how you do it:
Scald your milk. It’s hard not to make some Viking jokes about skalding the milk. But we probably have enough songs for milk already, so we’ll let our minstrels of magical ferments rest today. You’re looking for the same 180F/82C you would from any other thermophil.
Cool to 110F/43C.
Add your culture to the milk.
Add 1 drop of vegetable rennet or 2 drops of animal rennet per quart/litre of milk you’ve heated to 1 tablespoon of water (so you’d use a quarter cup of water if you’re making a full gallon), stir, then add to newly cultured milk. You need to scale this up or down if you’re doing less than a litre, which you can really only do with rennet if you’re using animal-based. Unfortunately, you can’t use tablets because a quarter tablet is around 5 drops of vegetable rennet (10 of animal). This is disappointing to me, because I’ve meant to make the skyr with rennet at some point, and I only keep tablets in the house for cheesemaking.
If you’re using a yogurt making appliance, you’ll let it sit in there overnight. If you’re using a cooler or the oven with the light on to culture your thermophils, go ahead and tuck it in there and let it sit overnight. It needs about 12 hours to properly separate.
Spoon the curds (leave the whey behind) into a strainer bag and either suspend the bag over a bowl from a knob or whatever in your kitchen or put the bag on a colander set over a bowl to spoon it in. Let this drain until it’s thick like you want it.
Fridge. It should keep for up to a month in the fridge, but make sure you pull your culture within the first week. You can store your reserved culture in the freezer if you need more than 5-7 days before you make the next batch!
Does Jun contain Saccharomyces boulardii?
— Casey
The short answer here it no. Before I go into more detail, I want to give the following disclaimer: if you eat a diet rich in sugar and/or are immunocompromised, it’s not good to consume this yeast. With sugar-rich diet, you can get some pretty nasty bloating and gas, and with immune disorders, you can (although it’s rare) develop fungemia, which is the fungal version of sepsis.
Moving on from health notices, jun doesn’t demonstrate presence of S. boulardii in lab tests, so we should assume it’s not there. Where you generally find this strain of yeast is in beer brewing (it’s one of very few probiotics that is almost across the board manufactured rather than consumed from whole foods). It’s got some wicked cool health benefits, but S. boulardii is mostly going to be found in beer. If you really want it in your jun, my vote is to buy unpeeled mangosteen or lychee fruits and put them (with the peels) in your second ferment (F2). That will of course infuse your jun with whichever fruit flavor you went with, but it should add the yeast you’re hoping for.
This culture was extracted from these two fruits (the only known natural sources of S. boulardii) after Henri Boulard observed that its use (through the chewing of lychee peels) relieved cholera symptoms from the indigenous folk wherever it was in Southeast Asia that Boulard was at the time. Sources are bizarrely, for this period of history, unclear as to where exactly he was over there, but we can make some educated guesses if we feel like it, because the dude was French. So he would’ve been in Vietnam, Loas, Cambodia, or possibly in Guangzhouwan.
Tl;dr: no, but you can add one of the two fruits where S. boulardii naturally presents: unpeeled mangosteen and lychee in your F2 to add the yeast to your jun.
