Iron Chef: Yoghurt Adventure

When I was in Byron recently I was excited to stumble across a Queensland brand of yoghurt made from coconuts. It seemed perfect for the upcoming Iron Chef battle. I found a recipe for yoghurt in “Eat Vegetarian” by Sam Stern (which is one of my favourite cookbooks at the moment) and substituted milk for coconut milk. Before I regale you with the horrendous failure that was Friday night’s yoghurt attempt, here is the recipe I was using:

• 1 litre of coconut milk
• 1 sachet of natural yoghurt starter (health food shops have these)

1. Boil the milk until it rises, then remove from heat.
   
2. Pour into a bowl or jug let the milk cool down to luke warm (about 40 degrees).
   
3. Stir in the yoghurt.
4. Leave, covered, for 6-8 hours somewhere warm. It’s important that the temperature is around the 38 degree mark and that the yoghurt isn’t disturbed. The yoghurt should thicken – you might need to leave it longer if the temperature is low.
   
5. Put yoghurt in the fridge to cool – and then it’s ready to eat! You can use this recipe to make greek style yoghurt just by straining it.

Sounds pretty easy, right? That’s what I thought. I was all ready to go, I had my pot and cans of coconut milk, my yoghurt starter and a spoon, and had fired up the (one working) hot plate. Five minutes later it became apparent that the one working hot plate did not work. I decided to utilise some high-end engineering skills, and hit the stove top whilst swearing colourfully.
I tried the other hot plates. Maybe, in dying, it had given its power to one of the others. To my surprise, the third plate I tried did begin to heat – a few minutes after spewing noxious smoke into the kitchen. Once the fumes had cleared, it worked quite well. And by well, I mean five times more slowly than it should have.

But, the coconut boiled. Good – now for the easy stuff! I should mention that the starter I used is not from an English speaking country – nothing on the box is written in English, and there was just the shop’s sticker explaining what it was. Luckily there was a small slip of English instructions inside; however neither the “don’t disturb while maturing” nor the “leave for longer if cold” advice were immediately obvious on these instructions.

Sam Stern suggests wrapping a towel around your yoghurt “if it is chilly”.


Ten hours later, the Antarctic climate of our house had produced a saucepan of: coconut milk.


No yoghurt. No yoghurt-ish texture, no yoghurt-ish flavour. Damn.

In the end I heated my oven to 50 degrees, let it cool a smidgen and then put the yoghurt in there. I repeated this process over the next 8 hours, and by lunchtime on Battle Day the milk began to taste like yoghurt, and was a bit thicker. Presumably, if I had done this to begin with, and hadn’t moved it about so much, it would have actually worked the way it was meant to.

I added some pineapple bits & juice to the yoghurt-ish slop, and it actually tasted pretty good. With a bit of honey and cinnamon, poured over fresh fruit, I didn’t think it did too badly. Certainly not what I was going for, but I think I’ll try again at some point. I’m thinking that if you put the yoghurt in a jug, and then put the jug in a bowl of boiling water, you’d be able to keep the temperature constant by switching the water whenever it cooled.

Do not let my failure deter you – clearly I am inept and an idiot. Sam Stern’s book is brilliant: he’s kind of like a tiny Jamie Oliver who seems to favour vegetables. His book has lots of pictures, easy to follow instructions, and great advice about substitutions and variations on all the recipes. He explains how to make heaps of basic stuff from scratch – like bread, yoghurt, cheese, and pizza – and from there you have so much scope to experiment. I’ll do a post on some of his bread recipes I’ve tried eventually. I suspect his yoghurt may work perfectly for actual milk; a friend informed me that coconut juice used to be used to sanitise wounds which might explain its reluctance to host bacteria in our freezing cold lounge room.