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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I know this is about cheese but I find it interesting how the first cheese might have been created. [Callu de cabrettu](https://www.atlasobscura.com/foods/callu-de-cabrettu). This could be done even before the domestication of milk producing animals.
I have a lot of brewer friends who went through my university’s food and fermentation program. They were always trying to catch wild yeast and bacteria in their mash to try and make unique sours. When they’d find a good one, they would collect some of dregs and use them in the next brew. Any other fermentation works the same way, leave it out and hope for a good starting culture, and then reuse that starting culture. Of course they had many rotten batches this way because it’s more luck based than anything. Yogurt, beer, wine, bread, sauerkraut, pickles, you name it, it can be wild fermented. Buying a starter is just a known variety of microbes that will produce a certain result. There are a lot of specialty yeast cultures at the local brewery supply store that add different kinds of flavor and used for different sorts of beer. Yogurt is similar, different blends of microbes do make different kinds of yogurt, whether is be traditional, Bulgarian, Greek, or other types of fermented milk products like sour cream, kefir, buttermilk, etc.
My first yogurt was made using yogurt starter that I bought from a company called Positively Probiotic. They have loads to chose from, and they don’t weaken over time. Still using my previous batch to start a new batch after a couple of years!
WARNING GROSS:
You can take a piece of partially digested food (poop) from the animal’s intestine and use it to inoculate your milk in order to make cheese/yogurt.
But people don’t have giant herbivores living in the city so they have to introduce the starter culture a different way.
Randomly.
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.
Turkish markets used to sell milk out of bowls kept outside. They would simply add more and more milk to it and sell the thickened product.
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