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 have a question about the quark culture (I have both meso and thermo). I may try adding a small amount of rennet to make it thicker and strain it for more of a cream cheese texture. Would rennet negatively affect the culture for subsequent batches? Or would it be better to set aside some without rennet for culturing future batches?

—Melinda

I think you should take a culture first (2, actually; always have 2 backups), because it’s experiment time! I’m extrapolating that it shouldn’t muck it up at all, because traditional skyr has the rennet and the culture added at the same time, and you obviously can’t get a new sample saved unless you’ve finished fermenting the milk. Given the similarities in preparation styles, it’s really hard for me to see why it wouldn’t be transferable. So yes, take backups from both first, but then go nuts and please let me know what happens!

Can I use a non-dairy milk? We have goat's milk and I use a lot of Almond, Coconut, Hemp, Oat, Cashew, and other "milks", as we are a non-dairy, gluten free, soy free household.

— Charlotte

You can, yes. We sell a vegan starter specific to coconut cream, but you can use our cultures with goat and non-dairy milks. That said, they will not set properly without a stabilizer of some type, so I would recommend you go with milk kefir grains instead of yogurt, since the milk kefir should function normally in any milk. For non-dairy (your nut and similar “milks,” not your goat milk; goat milk is still dairy and has the lactose milk kefir grains and yogurts feed on, so it doesn’t need any help feeding kefir grains), you’ll need to add some date paste to the milk when you add your grains or they will starve, but it sounds like grains may be a better fit for your situation if having the yogurt-y sort of texture is important to you. If you don’t mind a yogurt consistently being more of a drinkable one (without stabilizers added), the only one we have that isn’t made with cow’s milk is the vegan coconut yogurt, but we have a number of other yogurts that would be fine for your goat. Just be aware that our dairy yogurts are all made with cow’s milk.

Do you have any suggestions as to the starter with the most probiotics? I'm new to this and will be using whole cow's milk and making it in an instant pot.

— Bill

Milk kefir will always be the most potent culture, full stop. What is particularly nice about milk kefir is that no instant pot is needed – it’s a counter-top culture! If you really do want yogurt, amasi (up to 13 strains) is the most potent yogurt/soured milk, but also is a counter-top yogurt. After that, it comes down to flavor preference because the rest all float in the 2-5 strains range.