My Empire of Gurt

So, my mother-in-law Anne came to town for a few days and we had a great time. We made the rounds, did all the Champaign stuff, and saw some historic places. Before I get into all of that, though, we're going to talk about Sunday, the last day of vacation.

Cheesemaking 101
I'm following the trail blazed by Dr. Fankhauser of the University of Cincinnati Clermont College. He's a Biology professor and homesteader who's also into folk dancing. During the 60s, he marched with the Freedom Riders in Alabama and Mississippi for civil rights. Interesting guy. As a homesteader, he makes his own cheese, slaughters his own meat, and milks his own goats.

This is his full website:
http://biology.clc.uc.edu/Fankhauser/

And here's his Homesteader Skills page:
http://biology.clc.uc.edu/fankhauser/homesteading/Homesteading_skills.html

Yogurt
He has you make yogurt first. You use yogurt as a starter for cheese and learning to make yogurt helps teach you sterile processes since you have to use bacteria, but only the right bacteria. I'm just going to give you a brief overview of the process, since you can get the details from the good Doctor's site.

First, I sterilized the jars.

Then, I scalded the milk, bringing it almost to boiling, but not quite. Scalding the milk kills bacteria that might out compete the yogurt bacteria added later. This isn't as important in our modern age of pasteurized milk, but scalding also denatures (or unfolds) the proteins in the milk.

To make my yogurt, I needed to inoculate the scalded milk with active bacteria cultures. The bacteria used for making yogurt, Lactobacillus acidophilus and Streptococcus thermophilus, are lactic acid fermenting bacteria. That means they eat sugar (the sugar in milk is lactose) and poop out lactic acid. All Streptococcus species poop out lactic acid. That's why S. pharyngitis makes your throat sore (you might call it Strep Throat) and S. mutans erodes the enamel on your teeth to create cavities. Fermenting is the metabolic process where the little bugs extract energy from the sugar. The bacteria and yeast used to create bread, beer, and wine ferment (extract energy from) sugar and poop out alcohol. The scalded milk would kill our friendly little bugs, so I had to cool it in cold water before I set them loose.

I used a cup of milk and a cup of yogurt with active cultures of L. acidophilus and S. thermophilus to create a starter. I mixed the starter into the scalded milk so the bacteria could begin eating and pooping. The lactic acid coagulates the milk, but since the proteins have been denatured (unfolded), it doesn't form curds. The curds and whey congeal together to form yogurt.

After that, I poured the inoculated milk into 4 quart jars and one 8 oz jar (a starter for the next batch) and incubated the jars in warm water. You'll notice the species name of our Strep bacteria, thermophilus, means heat-loving. They are most productive at growing, multiplying, eating, and pooping at higher temperatures.

I left them in a cooler in the kitchen for 3 hours.

After three hours, I put the jars in the fridge to cool them. The next afternoon, my beautiful assistant Ainers taste-tested my first batch of homemade yogurt.

She said, and this is an exact quote: "It tastes like yogurt." Then she added honey, vanilla extract, and mangoes. I asked Anne if she wanted to taste it. She said, "No."

Making your own yogurt requires an investment in equipment and can take some time, but you can make a gallon of yogurt for the price of a gallon of milk and it lasts up to two months in the fridge. The time and price may be a wash depending on where you shop and what brand you buy, but like anything you make from scratch at home, it's fresh and you know exactly what goes into it. No cornstarch, no chemicals to artificially gel the yogurt, no artificial sweeteners. Just yogurt.

Winter Storm Virgil
Aeneid a snow shovel. That was a pun. See what I did there?

Anne got to see her first Illinois snow storm. In a way, I feel like I saw my first Illinois snow storm. Winter Storms Nemo and Q both left around 3 inches of snow. And that seemed pretty crazy. At the time. By the way, I thought the whole naming of Winter Storms like Hurricanes came via mandate from NOAA or some equally official governmental body in charge of naming things. No. It's just something the Weather Channel started doing.

It started snowing Sunday afternoon. We got 3 inches in the first few hours. I was all like wow, more snow.

It kept snowing, though. That evening, we had up to 5 inches. I thought that was really crazy, almost double the most snow we had this year.

It came up past my ankles when I walked the dog.

But it kept snowing. See the pictures from that night.

All night it snowed. Monday morning we had 10 inches on the ground and Anne's flight home got cancelled. Winter Storm Virgil. Everything I thought I knew about snow was a lie.

Next Time on the Illinois Cheese Chronicles
Now that we've made yogurt, I've bought some cheesecloth to make labneh, a Lebanese soft cheese. We'll probably do that this weekend.