This valuable guide’s explanations and examples will inspire both new and veteran yogurt-makers.
A comprehensive manual focuses on making your own yogurt.
Though yogurt is very popular, many people do not realize how simple it is to make at home. In 95 concise pages, fermented foods enthusiast Shepard follows up his 2021 book Smart Sourdough with a useful guide to yogurt making. Beginning with a brief and clear explanation of how milk turns into yogurt and the basic preparations involved, multiple methods of making and improving homemade yogurt are explored. Dedicated electric yogurt-makers, sous-vide cookers, Instant Pots, home proofers, and digital (smart) ovens as methods for yogurt incubating are compared, highlighting the ability of each technique to control the process and scale up to larger batches. A recipe for basic “Smart Yogurt” is supplemented by variations for Greek, French, and Mediterranean yogurts. Adding fruits, vegetables, herbs, powders, and juices during the yogurt-making process results in unusual flavors like chocolate, grape, and carrot. A section about improving yogurt’s digestibility includes two methods for making lactose-free yogurt and discusses extended fermentation. Deeper dives into tweaking homemade yogurt include diversifying the beneficial probiotic bacteria of yogurt and using plant-based starters, and, surprisingly, sauerkraut. After explaining how dairy-free “yogurts” sold in stores are actually “sour pudding that’s a yogurt substitute,” a method for making true dairy-free yogurt using soy milk finishes the book. Shepard’s writing is welcoming to the novice yogurt-maker. Veteran yogurt-makers who want to up their game will appreciate the later chapters. The importance of experimentation is stressed and humorously demonstrated by the author’s own experiences: “My tests with roasted cashews and roasted peanuts, for example, wound up tasting awful.” Brand names cited throughout (for example, Bubbies sauerkraut) are helpful to source ingredients, but are not imperatives, and underscore that yogurt can be made with items easily found in most grocery stores. Uncredited color photographs throughout helpfully illustrate different methods, setups, and results. An extensive index rounds out this slim but thorough book that is a must for home yogurt making.
This valuable guide’s explanations and examples will inspire both new and veteran yogurt-makers.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2025
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Shepard Publications
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.
The chef, rapper, and TV host serves up a blustery memoir with lashings of self-help.
“I’ve always had a sick confidence,” writes Bronson, ne Ariyan Arslani. The confidence, he adds, comes from numerous sources: being a New Yorker, and more specifically a New Yorker from Queens; being “short and fucking husky” and still game for a standoff on the basketball court; having strength, stamina, and seemingly no fear. All these things serve him well in the rough-and-tumble youth he describes, all stickball and steroids. Yet another confidence-builder: In the big city, you’ve got to sink or swim. “No one is just accepted—you have to fucking show that you’re able to roll,” he writes. In a narrative steeped in language that would make Lenny Bruce blush, Bronson recounts his sentimental education, schooled by immigrant Italian and Albanian family members and the mean streets, building habits good and bad. The virtue of those habits will depend on your take on modern mores. Bronson writes, for example, of “getting my dick pierced” down in the West Village, then grabbing a pizza and smoking weed. “I always smoke weed freely, always have and always will,” he writes. “I’ll just light a blunt anywhere.” Though he’s gone through the classic experiences of the latter-day stoner, flunking out and getting arrested numerous times, Bronson is a hard charger who’s not afraid to face nearly any challenge—especially, given his physique and genes, the necessity of losing weight: “If you’re husky, you’re always dieting in your mind,” he writes. Though vulgar and boastful, Bronson serves up a model that has plenty of good points, including his growing interest in nature, creativity, and the desire to “leave a legacy for everybody.”
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4197-4478-5
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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