Ask Allie!
What is 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.
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.
For troubleshooting active issues with a culture you’re working with, please check the FAQs or write us at support@positivelyprobiotic.com - you’ll get your answer faster that way! Please also take advantage of our Facebook group for troubleshooting, conversation, and getting to know more members of our community!
Hi, I was going to try to do the recipe from Priya on BA's youtube channel, and I was curious which culture that would be? or alternatively, the easiest to make without the use of a machine?
— Bryce
It’s always a party with Brad, Bryce! Cool question, too! She’s making dahi. Priya says somewhere around the 6-7 minute mark that this is her dad’s dahi. We do offer that culture, also.
I don’t use yogurt machines either. If you have a pressure cooker, you can use its yogurt setting in accordance with the manual’s instructions. If you don’t, you’ll do all the things to get the milk heated, culture added, etc., then you have a few options: you can wrap your covered vessel in a blanket or towel and stick it in a cooler (this is generally what I do if not using the pressure cooker) or you can put it in the oven with or without the light on to incubate. If you don’t use the oven light, you’ll want to wrap the vessel per cooler method.
I’ve had my sour cream culture in the jar for 24 hours and no apparent change. What do I do?
— Jim
If it’s your first or second batch, they sometimes are super runny, per our FAQ. Just reculture, and use the remaining liquid stuff for mashed potatoes, baking, or other such along those same lines. It should have recovered from its jet lag by the third batch. When you freeze 2 reculture-sized portions as backups from the first batch that’s the right texture, freeze them wet (I like breast milk bags for this because it’s what they’re designed for, in effect) and you won’t have repeats of this issue should you need your backups like you might with dried backups. I’m saying when, not if, because we really want everyone saving two backups of each culture. It upsets us when someone has to buy a single culture from us more than once, because our goal is for every culture sold to last for generation after generation within a family and whomever else it’s shared with.
I fed my starter yesterday and after a few hours put in the fridge. took it out this morning, thinking I might do something with it. It's been continuing to rise, more than double, but when I did a float test it sank. Could it be still feeding, or should I treat it like unfed? Also, in some recipes they say to feed in a ratio of 1-2-2. Does that dilute the starter? Should I save some of the original starter that was being fed 1-1-1 in order not to compromise it? Thanks so much, it's just kind of daunting but I do love how it's like a chemistry project.
— Cindy
Float tests fail so often that most people I know (including me) don’t use them. Often, when you change the ratio in that way, it can give the starter a “boost” if it’s a flagging some. Most of the time when I save starter, I give it no water and nearly cement-thickness so I can dry it more quickly. If I’m drying it wet, I just do the normal 1:1:1. If you don’t want to have to fuss with drying your starter, though, you can freeze it wet! I prefer to use breast milk bags for all cultures that can be frozen.
It really can be daunting getting used to how all of this works! The main thing to remember is that these are living organisms, so they will act weirdly at times, but that they are also quite forgiving and you can break a lot of rules without it affecting your final products. Also, keep it in your head that it’s okay to mess up: that’s how we learn most readily.
