Perfect Yogurt

On not following recipes

I accidentally made perfect yogurt the other day, after thinking I’d blown it.

It’s hard to express how perfect this yogurt is. It’s set almost like a panna cotta. It’s fresh and creamy and only a tiny bit sour. It has perfect mouthfeel and hardly weeps whey at all.

Perfect yogurt, if not a perfect photo

I’ve been making yogurt off and on for years. For ages I used the method listed in that I got off the early internets from a food scientist back East (lost to the link rot of the early intertubes, alas). Then I kind of got lazy, or gave it up again until Priya Krishna’s Indian-ish was released. She has a terrific recipe, which is mostly an anecdote about her father’s perfect yogurt method. So I started making yogurt again, and it was delicious, and eventually life got busy and I stopped again. Then I heard Homa Dashtaki interviewed on the Good Food podcast about her BEAUTIFUL new book, Yogurt and Whey. She was talking in particular about how making yogurt with her father, in their Iranian tradition, helped her slow down and get through a bad patch.

Slowing down sounded good again.

So I found myself in the kitchen the other day, putting a little over a quart of milk into a pan, setting the pan on a flame tamer, and heading off to do some other things while it heated up. The thing about scalding the milk is you want to do it really slowly, otherwise it scorches on the bottom, sticks to the pan, makes a mess and makes your yogurt taste burned.

I did it so slowly I forgot all about it until I walked through the kitchen and thought “what’s that smell?” It wasn’t burning, it was just simmering away over there. It had been for a while. The kitchen smelled nice, it was a warm smell, almost caramel, but I worried. When you make yogurt, you’re supposed to bring the milk just up to a simmer, then cool it down. I had NO IDEA how long the milk had been simmering. I gave it a quick whisk to break up the skin on the top, turned it off, and left it to cool down.

Now, despite having started my writing career in cookbooks, and having reviewed cookbooks for about five years for the late lamented Bookslut, I am terrible at actually following a recipe. What I love about yogurt and sourdough bread and my beloved French Yogurt Cake from Clothilde’s blog, is that they’re less recipes than they are methods, techniques.

I had stuff to do, so I let the milk cool down, scrubbed a few wide-mouth mason jars clean, and figured I’d give it a shot. What’s the worst that could happen? If it was ruined I could throw it away in the morning, but maybe it’d be okay? So I put a smear of yogurt in the bottom of every jar like Priya’s dad said to do, and I cooled the yogurt until you could hold your pinkie finger in there for a solid 30 seconds like Homa said to do. I added the yogurt to the warm milk and whisked it for a full 3 minutes like Priya’s dad said to do (not sure if it’s 3 minutes, but I knew it was a long time so that’s what I picked). The mixture was aerated and bubbly and smelled good and I poured it into the jars, put clean lids on.

And then, the best yogurt trick, the one I learned back in the early aughts from the food scientist online — you put the jars in a small cooler, and fill it with hot tap water to the lids. Close the cooler, and put it aside until the next morning.

The next morning I took the jars out of the now-room-temperature water, and tilted them. No movement! I like a really set yogurt. I was thrilled. It was really set! So I put it in the fridge for another rest and I have to say — this is the best batch of yogurt I’ve ever made.

The BEST.

Which brings me to recipes vs. techniques. I’m continually annoyed by the way people rely on recipes. I used to rant, when I was reviewing cookbooks, about recipes for bruschetta. Bruschetta is toast. People need recipes for toast?!? For gods sake, make some delicious crunchy toast and put things on it that you like! You don’t know what you like? Then try things! Experiment!

It’s not a science, and no matter what that annoying man in the bow tie tries to tell you, there is no one perfect way to cook anything! I have my bread technique, and my roasted chicken technique, and my pizza technique, and now an even better yogurt technique — but they’re all, always, a tiny bit different every time. That’s the glory of making things. That’s the glory of learning HOW to make things.

So I guess this is where we’ll sign off on my first post-notes Substack … with an exhortation to experiment. Let’s try new things! Let’s not box ourselves in! Who knows? you might get the best yogurt you ever made from what you thought was probably a mistake …