Mark vs. The Coconut Yogurt
Mark vs. The Coconut Yogurt
A tale of perseverance and victory
This is a piece about my recent forays into making coconut yogurt. It is not the last word; many of you, at least some of you, have more experience in this than I, and I’d love to get input from you. What I can say is that I determined a couple of weeks ago to make better-than-store-bought coconut milk yogurt, and now I have three different types in the fridge, and they’re all lovely, and when I finish here, I’m going to have some, with strawberries. But first a little history:
At its soul, making yogurt is dead simple: Take a bit of mature yogurt, combine it with five or ten times as much warm fresh milk (milk straight from the udder would work), keep it in a warm place, eat, repeat. You can readily imagine, then, how yogurt – more flexible, more stable, more digestible, more flavorful, than fresh milk, and much simpler to make than even the simplest cheese (of which it could be considered one) – long ago became a staple in many cow-raising countries.
The development of vegan yogurt is not so obvious but, although the oldest record I could find of yogurt made from soy milk dates to 1912, it’s hard to believe that in eastern Asia, where tofu has been common for centuries, people weren’t gently fermenting that same soy milk.
The process is the same: If you have vegan “milk” – the definition is being fought over, but let’s call it the dairy-milk-like extract of nuts (coconut, almond), beans (soy, peanut), seeds (sesame, and I’m sure others of which I’m unaware) or grains (rice, barley) – you can turn that “milk” into yogurt.
I happen to be a coconut freak; I learned how to make coconut milk at home (from a Julie Sahni cookbook) maybe 35 years ago, and I’ve never stopped. The ability to do that encouraged my experiments with south and east Asian cooking (for which I’m grateful) and, because dried, unsweetened coconut is inexpensive and lasts forever, and because the only other ingredient in homemade coconut milk is water, I don’t think I’ve bought more than three cans of coconut milk in my life, because I’m at heart a DIY-er; because store-bought is relatively expensive; and because it has additives I’d just as soon avoid.
The problem is that when I decided to make coconut milk yogurt — or let’s call it coconut yogurt; it sounds better — there were few precedents. Every online recipe, every recipe I could find, starts with canned coconut milk, which often contains sugar in addition to those additives, and is probably made by a process we don’t want to know about. Plus, not surprisingly, it tastes tinny.
So I bought a load of coconut from Bob’s Red Mill and set to work.
Coconut milk, as everyone who has ever used it knows, has separation issues. This is one of the reasons, I’m sure, that every coconut yogurt recipe starts with canned coconut milk, which is already stabilized, sometimes more effectively than others. So my first step was to figure how to “homogenize” my coconut milk, so it would become and remain nice and creamy as it soured.