I went on a spiral of homemade yogurt videos. But what I noticed was the common step in all of these videos is to add a dollop of existing yogurt to inoculate the new one. But how was the original yogurt made? Please explain. Thank you!
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Bacteria need to eat certain sugars in the milk to make yogurt, but you need the right bacteria to do thay (often called “good” bacteria). An easy way to get a culture of the bacteria that makes yogurt is to take previously made yogurt.
Modern milk goes through a process called pasteurization that removes all of the bacteria from it. If you let unpasteurized milk sit, it will make cheese/yogurt in an unpredictable process due to the lack of control of the bacteria present. At one point in the past, someone got lucky, and the “good” bacteria was the dominant presence in the milk. They made yogurt and saved some to make the next batch and repeat.
You could make yogurt from scratch if you could collect the right bacteria from somewhere.
The same idea applies to a sour dough starter. It has the necessary bacteria to make sour dough.
Yeast, we have been able to isolate for a very long time, and it’s how we make beer. Before yeast was discovered and isolated, people just used the same containers over and over again, not properly cleaning them (because health standards didn’t exist) and the yeast lived in the containers. This also led to some superstitions in the brewing industry because you could follow the exact same instructions in two different containers and get totally different results due to different initial bacteria presence.
It wasn’t until a Swiss scientist proved that bacteria was necessary to the process by showing that beer wouldn’t ferment in a perfectly sterilized container.
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