Make fresh yogurt at home easily with this culture!

This freeze-dried starter culture is of excellent and consistent quality and with care should provide delicious yogurt, time after time. It is not a monoculture, but a carefully balanced blend of lactobacillus bulgaricus and streptococcus thermophilus, which has been developed to ensure optimum results.The culture is supplied as a freeze-dried sachet which is simply stirred into 1 litre of  fresh milk and then incubated by keeping at 42-44°C for 6-8 hours to produce the starter solution.  This starter solution, when produced as above, should be stored in a suitable container and kept tightly covered in the refrigerator. Once prepared, the solution should not be frozen but simply kept refrigerated at all times - note that this is different to our cheese starter cultures, where the prepared starter solution is not affected by freezing. Please note that the culture is used to start the culturing process and may be different viscosity to the finished yogurt.

The unopened yogurt starter sachets may be stored in the freezer and this will also extend their shelf life indefinitely.

For the actual yogurt production, the best method is to use pasteurised or sterilized milk, or if using raw milk then heat first to 95°C to kill off any unwanted bacteria and then cool. With the milk at 42-44°C add about 3% of the starter solution - i.e. 30 ml (or 2 tablespoonsful) per litre, stir and incubate at this temperature for 6-8 hours to produce thick creamy yogurt. After incubation, stir in whatever fruit or flavourings are desired and pour into suitable containers and refrigerate.

The 1 litre of solution produced from each sachet is enough for the production of over 30 batches of yogurt - how's that for economy!

Provided you sterilise everything and keep the bowl in the fridge tightly covered at all times and away from any foods with a high bacterial load (e.g. meats, offal etc.), you should be able to make your yogurt starter solution last for 3 weeks and possibly more. As long as the yogurt forms properly and tastes as it should, then simply keep going!

Full instructions are provided with every sachet and electric yogurt makers and yogurt pots are also available in our shop - please take a look.

For those wishing to make vegan yogurt, please use our vegan culture specially designed for this purpose.