Cooking at Home

I've been trying to include a lot of local food in my diet for a couple of years, now. It's been a great experience and there's no doubt I love the food. Yesterday, I talked about my canning frustrations, but when all is said and done, the simple truth is: I love to cook. So I'm always trying to make my own... whatever. I like to buy local ingredients and go from there.

This includes my quest for the perfect yogurt. I wasn't interested in yogurt with "fruit" or anything else in it. I wanted plain, true yogurt. I'd add my own mixings at home.

The baseline was the yogurt I had for breakfast in 2003 at Glenloe Abbey in Galway, Ireland. It was creamy, rich, and fresh. It tasted like the milk had just come from one of the cows we could see outside the restaurant window, grazing in the Abbey's pasture.

Back home, the search began. And failed. And failed again.

Okay, it's a no-brainer that Lucerne or Dannon or Yoplait weren't going to make the grade. In fact, it wasn't always easy to even find plain yogurt in those brands. Everything was loaded with sweeteners and flavoring (rarely with any actual fruit, mind you - but lots of flavorings). So I moved on to Strauss (not bad), Nancy's (still not bad), and Pavel's (too strong). But none of them came close. It's true that by this time, I no longer remembered the exact taste of my baseline yogurt, but I figured I'd know it when I tasted it.

As I got more into buying local foods, the search was complicated by the location factor. Technically, Strauss is local, but can I really be sure the yogurt in the store came from a cow in California? Certainly the milk was mixed in a factory with milk from other parts of the country. Not good enough. Then I found Redwood Hills Goat Yogurt and that came pretty darn close. About as local as I could get, it was creamy and rich. I loved it. I had a hard time finding it sometimes, but it was great.

Except... not quite there. I was content, but a little bud of dissatisfaction kept nudging me on. What if, I occasionally thought, WHAT IF - I made my own yogurt?

I don't always move quickly. The thought fermented (hee) in my mind for a while and when I read Barbara Kingsolver's marvelous book "Animal, Vegetable, Mineral" I came across her chapter on making cheese. Which led me to http://www.cheesemaking.com/ and the New England Cheesemaking Supply Co. Okay, I know. It's not local. But I could buy a yogurt maker from them, couldn't I? See, just like with canning, I needed some hand-holding when it came to making yogurt. They not only sold a great yogurt maker, they had lots of instructions.

So I jumped in. Fresh raw milk from Claravale Farms (which I could get at Whole Foods or pick up with my occasional grocery order from Three Stone Hearth), a little bit of powdered milk, some yogurt starter and...

Oh yeah. If this yogurt is not at the baseline, it's too close to call. I'm hooked.