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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Hi Allie, which of the thermophilic yogurt cultures work well with skim milk. I dont drink whole milk, unfortunately.

— Ellen

All of them will work with skim, though they’ll have a looser texture and you may wish to strain some of the whey out to thicken your yogurt. That said, skyr traditionally is made with skim milk, so if you want one that has hundreds of years of being incubated with skim, skyr is your guy.

Top of the day to you. I have a question about activating thermophilic yogurt.
The instructions say to initially do 3 activation batches. The instructions for the activation batches seem clear for the first batch, but not for batches two and three. Specifically step three of the instructions say to add a packet of starter culture to the milk. I'm assuming that the 2nd and 3rd time of doing an activation batch an amount of yogurt from the previous batch is supposed to be used, and if that is a correct assumption, what is the amount?

— Phil

Hi, Phil! Thanks for pointing out to me that during my last revision of those instructions, the ratio of backslop (yogurt from the old batch) to fresh milk somehow got lost. That is fixed now, thanks to you! 

You use 1 tablespoon of yogurt from the prior batch for each cup of milk. Even if it’s runny or over-fermented. This ratio will be consistent forever.

What happened to the regional kefir selection?

— Karen

We still have them, but you have to put it in the notes which one you want. We mostly are doing combination grains that have all the regional strains together for maximum diversity, but we do still sell regional grains upon request.