Dannon Ain´t Got Nothin´On Me

There are some things in life that scare me: airplane travel and rodents mainly (funny that I took three flights to come to a country where we eat rodent for dinner regularly). I had an experience recently though that was scarier than all those other minor tribulations. As I stared into a pot full of light purple creamy goo, stuck a spoon into it, raised that spoon to my mouth, and ate what it was holding, I thought to myself, “This could be the last thing I do”. That´s right, I ate blackberry yogurt that I made with my own hands.

A couple months ago I went to visit a friend and saw a small scale yogurt project that some women from her town were doing. It wasn´t that complicated and would work well in my town since a lot of people have milk cows. They way things work here is that families will have 2-10 cows that they keep by their houses and everyday someone takes the cattle to their grazing lands. Every night they bring the cows home, milk them, and then the next morning a guy drives around in a truck and picks up the milk to take to one of the plants that packages the milk or makes cheese, ice cream, etc. Right now they are getting about $0.32 per Liter of milk. Then of course, they take that money and buy food with it. One of the things that is very popular in town is yogurt. So, my idea is to cut out the middle man and have people make their own yogurt.

The process basically consists of pasteurizing the raw milk, adding a bit of plain yogurt, and then letting it sit at 122-130° F for about five hours for the culture to work. It’s the five hours at high temp that are a bit of a problem up here. To do this I made a wooden box with three light bulbs inside. With an attached dimmer switch, I can keep the temperature pretty constant (would you expect less from a chemical engineer?). The first couple batches turned out OK, but not perfect. I´m going to keep working out the kinks, and hopefully we are going to start selling our 100% natural yogurt at the grade school to replace the artificially colored and flavored stuff that they sell now. And the best news is that after that first bite, I´m still around to write this post.