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!

To have your question answered in Ask Allie posts, please use the form on our website. If you prefer to be anonymous, just say so in the form and we’ll leave your name out when we answer it in the blog! Note that some submissions may be edited for clarity.

I have an yogurt maker and it works well for the Bulgarian yogurt. I am buying more yogurt types and I was wondering if you recommend other ways to produce the thermophilic yogurt. I saw some people recommending instant pot, but not sure if it a good alternative.

— Tiago

Instant pot works fine. If you go to the website and use the search function at the top to look up instant pot, it’ll come up with a few posts talking about the various processes you can do with that method. The two I use most often are the “How to Make Cold Start” and the “Foolproof Activation Batch” ones.

Note: I don’t usually admit this, but I use the search function at the top of our site all the time. I also really like to Google “positively probiotic” with whatever question I have that I wrote about previously and lost the answer that had been in my mind previously. If y’all didn’t know you could do this, you’re welcome! It’s a real time saver.

Which of your cultures are suitable for non dairy milk?

— Kristene

Milk kefir can be made with NDM, so long as you use date paste periodically to feed the grains. Our vegan coconut yogurt can be made with coconut, and any of the other dairy cultures can be made with any NDM so long as you add stabilizers to it.

Allow me please to ask a couple more questions.

1. I would like to ask is can sterilize UHT full cream milk be use in making yogurt? Which one results in better yogurt, pasteurize milk or sterilize UHT full cream milk?

2. In using mesophilic cultures, what temperature should the milk be before adding the cultures?

— Annlyn

Annlyn, you always have amazing questions!

I looooooove using UHT for my thermophils. In doing so, you have the ability (if you’re using an instant pot, yogurt maker, or similar) to do “cold start,” where you pour the milk straight from the fridge, let the appliance heat it up to 90-105 and incubate, and then it cultures as though you’d done the normal work of making yogurt. Before that I used regular pasteurized milk, but with UHT the proteins are already denatured for you which allows you to skip the heating and cooling step (or just heat to incubation temp if you’re using the oven or cooler method).

For mesophils, I pour my milk straight from the fridge. I see no valid reason to make more work for myself (or anyone else) when the cultures will do their with cold milk. I also, when I’m using a frozen culture for my current batch, don’t even bother to thaw. That’s true for me whether it’s thermophil (in an appliance) or mesophil.