Ever wondered how much yogurt it would take to make 150 portions of Yogurt risotto for the Michelin red Guide Gala dinner………….

Yeah I agree, Who wonders things like that!

Well just in case you ever wanted to know or had a crazy thought to try and do it let me tell you what it takes.

First of all I had to make the yogurt which took 50L of fresh cows milk, 35L of fresh sheep’s milk and 15L of Goats milk. So of course I had to heat the mixed milks to 80 degrees which as you can imagine takes a long time and a lot of effort to stop it sticking to the bottom of the pot. Then it had to be chilled to 40 degrees before I could add my cultured bacteria. The 4 hour fermenting process was by far the easiest part of the whole thing.

I then aged the yogurt for 10 days in a odor neutral location to increase the acidity as the lactic acid is the part which I need to react with the risotto.

Once aged I then had to strain out the solids and reserve all the Whey (yellow liquid part), so how do you strain 100L of yogurt? Very carefully!

I tried straining it through strainers lined with paper but it was going too slowly, so I hung it in absorbent paper and let gravity do the work.

Just for a fun fact, from 100L of yogurt I managed to get 40L of Whey which was more than enough.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 12th, 2009 at 10:59 and is filed under Food, Techniques. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.