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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Any milk that is left in the open at room temperature will eventually become home to bacteria. Most of the time, this is bad because those bacteria either make the milk taste bad, can make humans sick, or both. However, some kinds of bacteria are beneficial. Not only do they give the milk a pleasant tang and a thicker texture, they also out-compete the bacteria we don’t want to have. That’s how you get yogurt.
So the first yogurt was made pretty much by chance. For most of human history, we had no good way of keeping milk cold or otherwise protected from bacteria (nor a sense of what bacteria even is!) Mostly that meant we tried to consume milk before any bacteria got to it, but if some was left behind, we would occasionally get lucky and end up with a colony of yogurt bacteria rather than the nasty kinds. Eventually, we figured out that proactively mixing some old yogurt into milk that we couldn’t drink right now was a much more consistent way of “inoculating” the milk with our preferred bacteria. That still works today, though now you can also buy the bacteria on its own and add that.
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