I’ve been making or helping to make yogurt since I was about ten years old, and according to my mom, eating copious amounts of it since I was able to hold a spoon. I grew up eating Greek yogurt, but being part Greek, to us it was just yogurt. Our homemade yogurt, made from the milk of our golden Guernsey cow Buttercup, was strained through a draining box my father had fashioned. My mother would drape a finely woven muslin cloth over the box and then secure it with a wire, which tucked into a groove about 1 inch from the top of the box. The rich yogurt was then poured into the cloth and covered while the whey exited from little tunnels at the bottom of the box onto a drain board and into the sink. My favorite way to eat yogurt back then was (and it is still a guilty pleasure) to deposit a large spoonful of thick, raw local honey on top of the chilled yogurt and then use the same spoon to eat it, scraping the extra honey from the spoon a little bit at time.
It wasn’t until I was a teenager that I ate my first commercially made yogurt. I bought a container at the local market and used a spoon from the deli to give it a try. It was sweet, custardy, and mild, and I didn’t know that I was supposed to stir up the fruit on the bottom. Being a teen with the typical sweet tooth, I loved it, but to me it wasn’t real yogurt — plain, fresh, and with nuances of flavor.
For almost all of my adult years I have made yogurt for my family, mostly from store-purchased milk and later from our own goat’s milk. It’s always been for a trifecta of reasons: to save money, to reduce plastic waste, and (the best reason) for the flavor! Because I grew up making yogurt and have been doing it for so long (close to 40 years now if we’re counting), I had always thought that yogurt making was simple. As I explored the greater world of dairy ferments, it became obvious that not only can the process become complicated, but there is a world of surprising, almost unknown milk ferments out there waiting to be explored. My goal in writing this book is not only to open up the possibilities and enhance the enjoyment and success of making these products but also to share ways to work them into meals that preserve their amazing probiotic health benefits. I hope you enjoy!