SMART YOGURT

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.