I second these questions. I use the Greek yogourt from a local dairy shop as starter and the results are amazing, but I have never been able to use my yogourt as starter for the next batch, no matter how fresh it is.
You might like to try kefir grains. They are very stable, I've had the same grains for 5+ years, and you can leave in the fridge for months if you like.
I used to use dedicated yogurt culture, but "kefir yogurt" tastes exactly the same to me, so I use it for everything (yogurt, goat cheese, kefir-the-drink, obviously).
Thank you for the recipe. I don't think I'll ever make it that way though. Stirring the milk non-stop until it reaches 185°F and then continuing to stir if for another hour is much more work than I'm willing to put in.
Milk kefir usually doesn't require any temperature control, it just goes faster when the ambient temp is higher. I believe the idea is that the kefir 'team' is able to easily outcompete any weed microorganisms. For me it's as simple as: Strain in plastic colander, rinse jar, put grains and fresh milk in jar, then place in cupboard. If I want to delay then it can be placed in the fridge instead for months/years and still be able to be revived later.
Apologies, should have read the link.. which is indeed about following a yoghurt-like process using milk kefir grains! But you don't have to do it that way, it can be really easy!
That's great. If you don't mind, I have two follow-up questions:
1. I believe kefir is usually the same consistency as buttermilk, not yogourt. How do you make them as thick as yogourt?
2. How do you keep your kefir grains alive? I don't use a huge amount of yogourt. Can you freeze grains between uses? How often do you need to make a new batch to keep the grains alive?
Yeah Kefir is usually only slightly thicker than buttermilk, but it can be strained to make it thicker. It doesn't form solid curds like yoghurt though, but has its own particular fractal-y curd structure.
When not in use I just put the jar in the fridge (as long as it's only been at room temp for <24h) and it can stay there for weeks slowly getting more sour. At some point the kefir becomes too sour to be palatable, but will recover just fine after a feeding or two. I also keep backup grains in water in the fridge for years and have revived one of those after 5 years or more! Apparently the grains can also be dried and revived after years as well but I haven't tried that.
There's lots of info about milk Kefir on Dom's Kefir In-Site (straight from the nineties web!):
you strain the grains and add them to fresh milk every day. you can get them to make less by dividing the grains and tossing or eating some. It will get pretty thick if your bacteria are chugging out acid. My kefir would always end up not sour after a week or so. I could revive it for a bit by adding some lifeway kefir, but the ambient temp favored the yeast. A less cold fridge might let the grains run and favor the bacteria to keep it sour. Also lifeway kefir makes a good yogurt starter.
Just to clarify, I have been able to use one batch to start the next. I've used various yogurts from Whole Foods (2% or whole, but always plain/unflavored).
My first culture lasted through about 15 cycles (8 mo) before developing a weird blue cheese odor/flavor. When I started again, I also noticed the first batch of the new yogurt was substantially thicker than the last batch of the old yogurt.
The trick I've used is that I freeze cubes of the first batch in an ice-cube tray. Then whenever I make more, I unfreeze a cube, so I'm always making a "second generation" batch. My first generation I make from packets you can find online for ~$1.
I used to scald milk (in an Instant Pot this is the yogurt "high" setting) before making yogurt, but no longer do so.
Now I buy UHT pasteurized milk, which encompasses most organic milk, and simply run 18 hours of the Instant Pot "medium" setting. I start the instant pot, add two half gallons of milk, then pour in some Bulgarian yogurt as a starter and stir, then lid on and leave it alone until it beeps at me.
I normally get around three gallons of yogurt out of a one quart jar of the Bulgarian, which comes in a conveniently Mason-threaded quart jar, where I hoard the leftovers for storing my own yogurt.
Why did you switch from scalding regular milk to UHT? 18 hours is a long time to make yogurt. I do the scalding, let it cool in a fridge for an hour, and then make yogurt for 6.5 hours. This works for non-UHT milk (doesn't for UHT).
Not OP, but I've found that using UHT (or semi-UHT as many refrigerated organic milks are in Australia) works just as well as a heat->cool of non-UHT (after all, UHT is just milk that has been heated then cooled). So it's less work/fussing around/friction, and I end up making yoghurt more often. I usually do a 12 hour cycle. The heating (either at home, or via UHT) is necessary to modify the proteins so it thickens.
Interesting. For me (in the US), UHT was usually a failure - but as I said, I do it for only 6.5 hours. I could try doing it for longer, and I guess that's convenient for overnight. But otherwise, heating + 6.5 hours for regular milk is faster.
What I don't understand is: Why does heating + 6.5 hours work for non-UHT milk but not for UHT? It's not just me - I Googled at the time and many others had the same experience: UHT milk often fails. Like me, they all were doing 6-8 hours.
Googling now, I see lots of people arguing if UHT makes it harder to make yogurt or not. Personally, I'd like to see examples of people making decently thick yogurt (without straining) in under 7 hours with UHT (whether they scald or not).
This site[1] says there was a study done that showed unheated UHT was runnier than heated non-UHT. I didn't check the study to see how long they set it for.
This site[2] also points out that UHT for 10 hours was still quite runny. They had to add powdered milk to get it thicker.
So I haven't tried actual UHT; I use 'ultra-pasteurised' organic milk, which is refrigerated, but has a much longer expiry date than you would expect from milk, and you can taste the extra heat treatment. 8 hours works great and gives a thick yoghurt (haven't tried less than that; usually do overnight so around 12 hours). It does tend to get progressively less thick generation after generation. I use a supermarket organic plain yoghurt as a starter (there's a certain ratio of starter yoghurt to milk required - I use 4 Tbsp yoghurt to 1L milk)
When I try to use UHT milk, I usually fail in making yogurt. But that may be because I do 6.5 hours and he's doing 18 hours. Perhaps you need to go so long with UHT?
I just use the functions on my Instant Pot. The "Boil" function brings it to around 180°F. Then I let it cool to between 90-115°F before adding the yogurt. Then use the "More" function and it sets a timer for 12 hours ("Less" goes for 24, and I've never used it). All of these functions are available under the yogurt button on the Instant Pot.
My understanding is it may be possible to skip the boiling if you are using ultrapasteurized milk (lactose-free milk often is) from a just-opened container.
If you know any Indian family ask them. Most Indian households make yogurt every day and the culture is months even years old. They will use latest generation to make the next batch.
Get the biggest thermos flask you have. Get as much milk as it fits.
Get any yogurt. So far literally anything has worked: flavored, with added sugar or even the cheap versions with lots of gelatin.
Heat the milk around until it boils. Add sugar until it's slightly sweet but not too much (this will feed the culture. It won't be sweet after). Let it chill until 40c or slightly above body temperature.
Now mix in the yogurt, you need like 6 teaspoons for a liter milk, but just pour the container you have for good measure.
Pour the mix in the thermos flask and leave for aprox 4 hours, or until the whey separates. After that, the longer you wait the more acidic the yogurt gets.
Now time to strain. I put a sheet of coffee filter paper on the bottom of a pasta colander and another container beneath to collect the liquid. Pour the yogurt there, leave overnight in the fridge and you get thick Greek yogurt.
> Any one dollar plain yogurt from the supermarket works fine
A surprising number use additives to thicken them, and as I result I found I got better results from ones labeled Greek or acidophilus. I have no idea if there is any science behind this claim, so YMMV.
I've had a lot of success with plain Kirkland greek yogurt but most should work.
I also do 1 gallon at a time and microwave it to get it up to temperature. This takes about 20min from fridge to desired temperature.
After fermenting in my instant pot, I pour it into a fine mesh strainer on top of a large food container and put it in the fridge. The container is for the whey to collect in. This turns it into Greek yogurt.
I got a powder culture from Amazon because I am using raw milk and it would just not work with yogurt from the store. There are several different cultures available in 10 or 12 sachets and you might need a new one every 6 months or so. I tried a few different ones and I cannot feel the difference between them.
I've used Tillamook and brown cow as starters and they've been fine for a second batch at least.
I don't strain mine, instead i chuck in like half a cup/gallon of dry milk. It's sort of the bass ackwards method. Then I part it up into quart Tupperware.
I saw a stat a while back that showed that any higher levels of policing of minority communities was directly attributable to higher levels of disturbance reports from within the communities themselves.
So police aren’t just looking for offenders in minority communities. They’re going where the communities are asking them to be.
No True Scotsman defense incoming, as people pretend that a “very very small niche” is what it means when high-profile congressional members put forth positions that are not vigorously denounced by the media and their political allies.
Not surprising since those are all Sinclair stations just repeating canned statements.
What’s really scary is when mainstream media outlets from a variety of corporate entities all repeat the exact same talking points that are exactly in sync with one political party.
Built an ISP back in the mid-90’s with some friends as a startup. Dial-up, ISDN, Frame Relay, DSL, etc.
My one piece of advice is to not overestimate sales. We engineering types tend to underestimate how hard it can be to sell things. We love the “build it and they will come” fantasy. The real world rarely works that way, especially for something as run-of-the-mill these days as internet service.
The ironic thing is that the people on Hacker News understand security.
They know that a lack of voter ID, mass mail-in balloting, ballot harvesting, lack of chain of custody of ballots, lack of ability to observe the counting of ballots, etc. are all terrible security practices. They practically guarantee fraud in elections.
If you told the average HN reader to secure his banking information like we secure the vote, she would think you're out of your mind. But somehow, a complete lack of ballot security is just dandy. It's almost like some people feel that any means necessary to win is okay.
Who is proposing we eliminate the chain of custody for ballots? Who's actually called for that. Who has said "no observation of ballot counting" as opposed to "everyone who feels like it can come in and wander freely to investigate". Ballot harvesting has at least 3 different definitions, some of which are fine (put your ballots somewhere other than a polling place, and officials collect them) others are dubious (give some person you trust your ballot, have them deliver it to the polls). And if these things are "guaranteeing" election fraud, show me where it happened on such scale as to matter (and not some dude who did something he shouldn't but got caught and therefor disproves your point about how bad the security is).
What does that have to do with Google's use of your SSID? If someone wants to use your SSID signal to image what's going on in your house, they don't need to have first gotten your SSID from google's mapping database.
Right, if those cases were COVID, why wasn't there a mass outbreak at that time in their area, causing a surge in hospitalizations?
When asked, most of the people I've talked to couldn't even point to other people to whom they spread their mystery illness. If it was COVID, it would have been far more contagious and they likely would have hospitalized some of their elderly relatives with it.
Doesn't the virus spread, primarily, first through so-called super-spreader venues/events and then within households? If I read the article correctly, this was 9 individuals out of 24 thousand. It's plausible that there would be no mass outbreak.
Yeah, I remember an article a month or so ago that mentioned SARS-CoV-2 has a higher "clustering" rating than common cold/flu, which meant a smaller number of people caused more spreading, and that there wouldn't be a noticeable outbreak until the virus reached one of these superspreaders.
While I agree with the general point you and the op are making, I don’t think your specific assertion is correct. Covid attack rates have exhibited significant overdispersion; some people infect large numbers of other people, but most infect one or no other people. Given this, the fact that the people with these anecdotes didn’t infect anyone they know of is not evidence that they did not have covid (though again, I do think you’re correct that they didn’t have it).
I think we more specifically know something emerged that was much more deadly and contagious around January/February. That does not completely eliminate the possibility that an earlier variant was present, which might be cross-reactive and might provide antibodies for some. We’ve seen that happen multiple times since then. Knowing if a lab leak was likely could help clarify this perhaps, since those may be opposing origin stories.
You can see where it compares infections to proportion of strain that they only spiked when "L" disappeared and one or more of the "G" ones became dominant. There's only 7 countries listed here, but I think I remember a different article that had more, and the pattern was pretty consistent.
There have been many variants that emerged in the US[0][1], but none of them have been significantly more infectious than the original Wuhan variant (until the Epsilon variants emerged very recently). Most of the ones that are more infectious than the Wuhan variant got nuked by even more infectious variants from elsewhere. I think perhaps the impression that there haven't been any variants stems from the fact that none of the big variants of concern have been from the US, which appears to have just been luck.
First I have to admit I had flu like symptoms in January, but being it was the first time in years I had been sick I decided to test for anti-bodies early on. I was negative for the anti-bodies.
>why wasn't there a mass outbreak at that time in their area, causing a surge in hospitalizations?
This raises a very big question about placebo effect/mass delusion. Is it possible media reporting of a pandemic for a new virus which we have no natural immunity for actually had an effect of negative health outcomes early on? Realistically the news alone could be responsible for increased stress, much less the real threat of uncertain near term economic instability, and excessive stress is devastating to immune systems (so potentially there could be a lot of data available regarding certain bio markers like increased cortisol across large swaths of the populace following the news leading to worse health outcomes compared to covid cases before the media reporting).
But let’s say for example where media ( I suppose backed by statistics) reported outcomes were better in youth than elderly been altered (even slightly) simply by reporting that youth had more severe symptoms and negative outcomes whereas elderly seemed to be relatively unaffected.
I'm really skeptical of the "I had a bad cough in late 2019, must have been COVID claims". I saw quite a number of them on social media last year. It seemed like people were eager to grab some sort of celebrity or a part of a conspiracy. Some of the people got really angry with me when I confronted their claims with skepticism. It's like they felt personally insulted.
The truth is, people get upper respiratory illnesses quite often. I had a nasty upper respiratory illness in late 2016 after a trip to London. I was miserable for weeks. If it had been late 2019, I could have joined in on the chorus of people claiming to have had something that "surely might have been COVID".
I agree with your comment. When I look at various respiratory viral dashboards for North America, we had a pretty typical year in 2019-2020. Therefore all these people likely just had some viral infection (flu, enterovirus, rhinovirus etc).
The crazy part is how much that has changed now though. Now if they said they had a bad cold in 2020-2021 flu season (and weren't tested), it is almost 100% chance to be COVID. Almost every other resp virus has disappeared.
Last November/December was for me the strangest flu season ever, coughing and sneezing for abnormally long period, my coworkers and mother also. And after, in January, I got a really strange what looked like herpes in the face. Followed by finger infection which I had never had, which could mean my immune system was abnormally weak
Thats another variable here. People get older and are more weak over time. Diseases hit you worse in your 30s than in your 20s. Health conditions also tend to crop up after a certain age, like heart conditions that you might blame on a vaccine instead of just you getting older and being predisposed to this condition.
As another comment pointed out, the small countries vs US Network effects excuse doesn't really fare well when you look at the successful startup environment of Israel.
The USA is perfectly aware of this dynamic because faced with TikTok, their first reflex was to try to ban them.
Israel should be lauded for managing to be an intensely vibrant and high-tech country, and European countries should try to learn from that, but even that is apparently not quite sufficient. So I think GP has a point.
Annoyingly, that list includes companies with Israeli founders that aren’t companies founded in Israel (e.g., WeWork). There’s no need to do that though, there are plenty of Israeli companies! (Oh, I see they have a pie chart of companies in Israel and it’s about 25% by value)
It’s also too bad that it excludes public companies
or large exits (e.g., Wix and Waze) since those are even better retorts to the “can’t build companies” claim.
None. But they have tons of startups that provide services to the military-industrial complex which is why they're so successful. They copied the USA's SBIR system but provide much bigger grants.
