Kyle Aaron
Active member
From the cottage cheese thread,
What yeast is to flour, yoghurt culture is to milk. It's a living organism, give it warmth and sugar and water and it does its thing - yeast produces carbon dioxide as it eats sugar, that's why bread rises, and yoghurt culture produces the proteins and fats from consuming the sugars in milk. Just as bread rises better in the warm, so does yoghurt form better in the warm.
The EasiYo thing is basically a thermos/eski. It has a little platform in it, you pour the hot water in to the bottom of that and put the lid on, keeps whatever's inside warm for several hours.
EasiYo packets have powder which you mix with warm water and put in the 1 litre containers they give you, that container then goes into the thermos, and 6-24 hours later you get yoghurt. The packets contain the starter culture (like yeast) and powdered milk. They are about $2.50 each. So after buying the EasiYo kit ($20-$25), your yoghurt would cost you basically $2.50/kg (aside from boiling water cost, a cent or two). Which is already 1/4 to 1/2 the retail cost of yoghurt.
What we did was to buy the starter culture itself from greenlivingaustralia. That comes in a packet, you put it in a sterile jar in the freezer.
To make the yoghurt, you get some regular whole milk and bring it to just before the boil and keep it there for five minutes, then leave it to cool until it's warm-lukewarm - you do that because the milk has some natural bacteria in it which the heat kills, if you have untreated milk sitting warm for hours in the thermos you just get sour milk.
You boil water and put it in the EasiYo thermos as usual, pour the lukewarm milk into the 1lt container, mix a tiny spot of starter culture in there, put the lid on the 1lt container, then the container into the thermos, then 12-24 hours later you have got your yoghurt.
Once you've made the yoghurt, you can take 1/4 of it and use that as the starter for another batch. However after doing that 2 or 3 times it becomes weak, and the batches are runny.
The starter culture is $11.25 and shipping $9.75 (has to be registered mail and kept cool). They claim 100 yoghurt batches from one packet of culture, but my impression is they assume you'll be doing the recycling, making 2 or 3 batches from each original. We don't do that very often as my woman likes the yoghurt pretty solid, but I put yoghurt in my protein drinks sometimes, so I think we'll get about 40 batches of the solid out of it, and another 10 batches of the runnier stuff.
Boiling the milk to the right temperature is a hassle, so what we do is get longlife milk - this has already been heat-treated to kill all bacteria. Then I can just warm it up a bit on the stove. The UHT (longlife) milk is also for some reason the cheapest milk (except for milk powder), and around here is $1.08/lt.
So the costs are,
EasiYo thermos & 1lt bottle ~ $20
EasiYo culture/powder packs ~ $2.50
Thus, $2.50/kg
or
EasiYo thermos & 1lt bottle ~ $20
Starter culture & postage $21, ~50 portions ---- of course you can buy a heap of culture packs, they freeze, and the postage doesn't go up much
UHT milk, $1.08/lt --- we use a bit short of 1lt as the mixture expands as it turns into yoghurt, if you have it to the top it overflows
Thus, $1.50/kg
I didn't factor in the thermos costs because that depends on how often you use it, whether you break it in six months, etc. But it seems fair to assume it'd last five years at least if you didn't smash it (it can be dropped on a tiled floor without breaking, I can attest...)
There are other things you can add, there's this calcium chloride solution they normally use to make cheese more solid, it seems to work on yoghurt, too (we use it). And chucking in a spoonful or two of milk powder also thickens it up and boosts its nutritional value. Those both put up the cost but it's still far under $2/kg.
I think you'd have to eat at least 1kg/week in your household for it to be worth the trouble, otherwise some of it would go off, raising the effective price to near retail. But we've found that having it cheaply available at home makes us eat more, about 2kg/week.
Obviously you can add flavourings and fruit to it afterwards. My woman is particularly fond of buying frozen berries and mixing them in, and also yoghurt drinks with blended-in banana, or using the yoghurt as a base for dips (eg eggplant dip). I use the yoghurt in place of cream in things like risotto, beef stroganoff and pumpkin soup. You can also get $10 packs with another 1lt container and a few cup-sized containers, I take a small cup for my afternoon tea at school.
We bought the EasiYo, yes. But we don't buy their packets now.Keen Katie said:
What yeast is to flour, yoghurt culture is to milk. It's a living organism, give it warmth and sugar and water and it does its thing - yeast produces carbon dioxide as it eats sugar, that's why bread rises, and yoghurt culture produces the proteins and fats from consuming the sugars in milk. Just as bread rises better in the warm, so does yoghurt form better in the warm.
The EasiYo thing is basically a thermos/eski. It has a little platform in it, you pour the hot water in to the bottom of that and put the lid on, keeps whatever's inside warm for several hours.
EasiYo packets have powder which you mix with warm water and put in the 1 litre containers they give you, that container then goes into the thermos, and 6-24 hours later you get yoghurt. The packets contain the starter culture (like yeast) and powdered milk. They are about $2.50 each. So after buying the EasiYo kit ($20-$25), your yoghurt would cost you basically $2.50/kg (aside from boiling water cost, a cent or two). Which is already 1/4 to 1/2 the retail cost of yoghurt.
What we did was to buy the starter culture itself from greenlivingaustralia. That comes in a packet, you put it in a sterile jar in the freezer.
To make the yoghurt, you get some regular whole milk and bring it to just before the boil and keep it there for five minutes, then leave it to cool until it's warm-lukewarm - you do that because the milk has some natural bacteria in it which the heat kills, if you have untreated milk sitting warm for hours in the thermos you just get sour milk.
You boil water and put it in the EasiYo thermos as usual, pour the lukewarm milk into the 1lt container, mix a tiny spot of starter culture in there, put the lid on the 1lt container, then the container into the thermos, then 12-24 hours later you have got your yoghurt.
Once you've made the yoghurt, you can take 1/4 of it and use that as the starter for another batch. However after doing that 2 or 3 times it becomes weak, and the batches are runny.
The starter culture is $11.25 and shipping $9.75 (has to be registered mail and kept cool). They claim 100 yoghurt batches from one packet of culture, but my impression is they assume you'll be doing the recycling, making 2 or 3 batches from each original. We don't do that very often as my woman likes the yoghurt pretty solid, but I put yoghurt in my protein drinks sometimes, so I think we'll get about 40 batches of the solid out of it, and another 10 batches of the runnier stuff.
Boiling the milk to the right temperature is a hassle, so what we do is get longlife milk - this has already been heat-treated to kill all bacteria. Then I can just warm it up a bit on the stove. The UHT (longlife) milk is also for some reason the cheapest milk (except for milk powder), and around here is $1.08/lt.
So the costs are,
EasiYo thermos & 1lt bottle ~ $20
EasiYo culture/powder packs ~ $2.50
Thus, $2.50/kg
or
EasiYo thermos & 1lt bottle ~ $20
Starter culture & postage $21, ~50 portions ---- of course you can buy a heap of culture packs, they freeze, and the postage doesn't go up much
UHT milk, $1.08/lt --- we use a bit short of 1lt as the mixture expands as it turns into yoghurt, if you have it to the top it overflows
Thus, $1.50/kg
I didn't factor in the thermos costs because that depends on how often you use it, whether you break it in six months, etc. But it seems fair to assume it'd last five years at least if you didn't smash it (it can be dropped on a tiled floor without breaking, I can attest...)
There are other things you can add, there's this calcium chloride solution they normally use to make cheese more solid, it seems to work on yoghurt, too (we use it). And chucking in a spoonful or two of milk powder also thickens it up and boosts its nutritional value. Those both put up the cost but it's still far under $2/kg.
I think you'd have to eat at least 1kg/week in your household for it to be worth the trouble, otherwise some of it would go off, raising the effective price to near retail. But we've found that having it cheaply available at home makes us eat more, about 2kg/week.
Obviously you can add flavourings and fruit to it afterwards. My woman is particularly fond of buying frozen berries and mixing them in, and also yoghurt drinks with blended-in banana, or using the yoghurt as a base for dips (eg eggplant dip). I use the yoghurt in place of cream in things like risotto, beef stroganoff and pumpkin soup. You can also get $10 packs with another 1lt container and a few cup-sized containers, I take a small cup for my afternoon tea at school.
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