You can make tasty and healthy yogurt at home if for some reason you do not want to buy store-bought dairy products. To do this, it is necessary to use milk of a certain fat content and the main component - yoghurt starter. What is such a leaven and where can you buy it?
Yoghurt starter allows you to prepare natural yoghurt without much hassle. It contains no preservatives, flavors, dyes and other chemicals. And most importantly, making homemade yoghurt does not require special knowledge, equipment and exotic products.
Where to buy yoghurt starter
Yoghurt starter is sold in pharmacies. It is a white powder; such a component can also be purchased at the All-Russian Research Institute of Dairy Products. A small bottle of sourdough will last for a long time.
Often, store-bought yogurt is used to make homemade yoghurt. It contains a scanty amount of useful substances, plus, when the product is stored, pathogenic microflora or E.coli appear in its composition. Moreover, it is constantly growing, which can lead to foodborne infections.
You can mix yoghurt starter with pasteurized, UHT milk. It is not recommended to use sterilized milk, because during its production the drink loses vitamins and other valuable substances. Also, using this technology, stabilizers are added to milk.
The liquid starter culture should only be stored in the refrigerator, the shelf life is two weeks.
Nuances of using yoghurt starter
To use a yoghurt starter, it must be diluted correctly. To do this, in slightly chilled boiled milk, you need to add a sourdough from a bottle (you can take about 200 ml of a drink). Then the liquid must be shaken and poured into a yogurt maker. In its absence, a simple thermos is used. The container should be placed in a warm place and covered with a blanket or pillow. 9-10 hours are enough for fermentation of the liquid. So you get a liquid yoghurt starter culture, it is better to store it in glass or metal containers, but not plastic.
Yoghurt starter can be mixed with baked milk to add a creamy flavor to the fermented milk product.
To make yoghurt, you need to boil a liter of milk and cool it to + 40 ° C. Add a tablespoon of liquid sourdough to the drink. It takes 5-6 hours to ferment yogurt in a yogurt maker or thermos. The resulting natural yogurt can be stored for about a week, but you need to add other components to it only before use. Nuts, berries, pieces of fruit or syrup are added to yogurt prepared using a pharmacy sourdough, you can also take jams, chocolate chips.
