Piimä: An Origin Story

Ah, piimä. Of all the yogurts, this one is my favorite because it sits at the intersection of my love for ferments and my love for plants. We gardeners tend to be a nutty bunch, caring about things we otherwise wouldn’t simply because a plant was involved.

Did you know that piimä isn’t even a yogurt? True story! It’s a soured milk. The technical definition of yogurt rests in the bacteria it feeds, and so only the thermophils are yogurts. All mesophils are, by definition, soured milk, but we can go on ahead and call them yogurts anyway. They do the same job, basically. Plus, they tend to be better for busy people, so let’s not let a name stand in our way! In most cases, piimä is a thin, slightly sweet, drinking yogurt with a cheesy undertone to its flavor. In my house it’s thick like a regular yogurt, because it gets eaten that way. Normally-textured piimä is the perfect yogurt for sauces, and even better sauces if it’s cultured with cream. Cultured with cream, is it a lovely addition to borscht, used in place of sour cream. You can also culture your piimä with soymilk, according to a number of sources I looked at, with excellent results. I haven’t tried this, so let me know how it worked out if you do! Just remember to put back a little extra culture in case the sources were wrong.

As with many of our yogurt cultures, this one is Scandinavian. It comes from Finland. We have so many Scandinavian cultures, in case you wondered, because no one goes through dairy like the Scandinavians do. They consume, on average, 80 gallons of milk per capita. That’s more than anywhere else in the world.

Looking at this, it’s hard to be confused as to why Scandinavians consume so much dairy.

So where do plants come into all of this? You can actually make piimä using one of two plants: common butterwort (Pinguicula vulgaris) or roundleaf sundew (Drosera rotundifolia)! This sounds crazy, but you can also make cheese from fig leaf sap and a few other plants. Sometimes, nature just wants you to eat some fermented milks! I don’t have these plants in my garden yet, but one day I shall!

As the story goes, farmers noticed that the cows that were eating butterwort had milk that cultures better and more quickly. Eventually, people started picking butterwort and sundew leaves to stick in their milk, which eventually grew into people simply reculturing from the prior batch as we do today.

There are some sources that claim that originally, viili and piimä happened together, where viili is the cream-top portion of the same ferment, except ropey, and piimä is the thinner “buttermilk” part of the ferment. That seems somewhat plausible to me as part of the origin story, because I have seem some pretty ropey piimäs out there. In my own fridge even, perhaps. We make them distinctly now, but I am interested to see how it would work when culturing directly from plant leaves. I’ll update this post if ever get one of them and manage to keep it alive. I struggle with carnivorous plants (and succulents/cacti).

This is common butterwort. It grows wherever it can.

Image courtesy of: https://www.minnesotawildflowers.info/flower/butterwort

Here is our sundew! Image courtesy of: https://wildadirondacks.org/adirondack-wildflowers-roundleaf-sundew-drosera-rotundifolia.html

There really is a lot that piimä lends itself well to - you can drink it, of course, or eat thicker versions per typical yogurts. You can make sauces or sour cream replications. It’s wonderful in smoothies, and of course I think all yogurts belong in mashed potatoes. It makes a wonderful strained cheese, being perfect to top breads with, English muffins, and even bagels! It also works well in pastry and breads, giving a wonderful sweetish tang to those. People also make cultured butter from piimä. My favorite thing to do with it, however, is to make a Jason’s Deli Copycat Fruit Dip. That is stupid yummy. We’ll be making that on Wednesday.

No matter what you like to do with it, piimä is basically the One Yogurt, so I hope you will explore and tell us about your experiments and adventures with this lovely soured milk!