Tzatziki

Recipe from COOKIE + kate

Made this for Emma during Covid, doing it again for her birthday.

• 2 cups grated cucumber (from about 1 medium 10-ounce cucumber, no need to peel or seed the cucumber first, grate on the large holes of your box grater)
• 1 1/2 cups plain Greek yogurt
• 2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
• 2 tablespoons chopped fresh mint and/or dill
• 1 tablespoon lemon juice
• 1 medium clove garlic, pressed or minced
• 1/2 teaspoon fine sea salt

Instructions:

1. Working with one big handful at a time, lightly squeeze the grated cucumber between your palms over the sink to remove excess moisture. Transfer the squeezed cucumber to a serving bowl, and repeat with the remaining cucumber.
2. Add the yogurt, olive oil, herbs, lemon juice, garlic, and salt to the bowl, and stir to blend. Let the mixture rest for 5 minutes to allow the flavors to meld. Taste and add additional chopped fresh herbs, lemon juice, and/or salt, if necessary (I thought this batch was just right as-is).
3. Serve tzatziki immediately or chill for later. Leftover tzatziki keeps well, chilled, for about 4 days.

Home Made Goat Yogurt

This takes a minimum of 6-8 hours to complete.

I used Trader Joe's European yogurt as the initial starter. I believe the TJ yogurt it tastes just like the Strauss yogurt we fell in love with in SFO.

Put 1.5 tablespoon of yogurt as starter into a 1 cup container to be warming up while you heat the milk.

Pour 6.5 cups of Sugar & Spice Cookie's goat milk into a stainless steel pot.

Heat Milk: Heat as slowly as possible to 180F, stirring occasionally with a stainless steel spoon. Do not use a wooden spoon. You should stir more often once the milk gets warmer to keep it from scorching on the bottom. Hold the milk between 179 - 184 for 15 min.

Cool Milk: Place pot of milk into a cool water bath in sink and stir until milk reaches 110F. This goes pretty quickly.

Add Starter: Add about a cup of warm milk to starter and stir with stainless spoon. Add diluted started back into pot of warm milk.

Wait: Pour milk with starter into yogurt Vita Clay crock pot and put on yogurt setting. Leave it alone for 5-6 hours or to taste. Don't move it or stir it. It is pretty forgiving on time if you forget it. I have done from 4 - 9 hrs, but at 9 hrs it was fairly sour.

Enjoy: Remove crock insert from Vita Clay and place in refrigerator. It will be firmer in the morning.

Homemade Yogurt

So far I've only tried this with fresh goat milk, but I assume it will work with grocery store milk as well.

Heat milk slowly to almost boiling (at least 180 degrees F) to kill any native bacteria that could compete with your starter. This also changes the structure of the milk proteins to create thicker yogurt. You could omit this step if you are using raw milk, but your yogurt will be runny and may not be true to your starter culture.

Pour milk into clean quart jar(s). Cool heated milk to 110-15 degrees, thin about 1 tablespoon of starter yogurt with cooled milk then stir the thinned yogurt into the cooled milk.

Place jar(s) in a 110-115 water bath and let it ferment for about 4 hours. Cooler, longer fermentation creates a thinner yogurt that will be more tangy flavor and is more easily digested.