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Comment by test001only | Hacker News Reader

Having come from tropical country and currently living in a country towards north, I find it extremely difficult to get anything fermented because of how it is cold during significant part of the year.

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Can't you have stuff ferment indoors?

When I tried making my own Sauerkraut following a recipe, it told me to keep in the warm appartment for the first week (to kickstart fermentation), and only put it in cold storage afterwards.

In Korea, it is common to use refrigerators (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimchi_refrigerator) to make Kimchi, precisely because the cold is actually good for fermenting cabbage!

Cold inhibits fermentation. Kimchee is stored in the fridge to prevent it from getting overly ripe. Overly ripe kimchee is gross unless you use it for jiggae (soup). Typically the main jar of kimchee is stored under refrigeration, and smaller portions are kept out to ferment to the desired ripeness for eating. Source: am korean

If you like to make yogurt at home then I highly recommend getting yourself a multifunction electric pressure cooker. You probably can get dedicated yogurt makers but I prefer the pressure cooker even though yogurt is made at normal pressure and low temperature since it is great for cooking many other things.

Homemade yogurt tastes so much better to me than store-bought!

Some electric ovens also have the ability to "cook" at low, precisely controlled, temperature for several hours, which makes it possible to produce yogurt.

I've had success just turning on my electric oven to its lowest possible temperature to heat the yogurt for a while, then switching it off and leaving it overnight. It's not rocket science, and people have been making yogurt without laboratory-grade precision for millennia.

Exactly. Zillions of housewives and nowadays probably singles, househusbands, students or employees living together, or anyone else, have been making curd (Indian term for yogurt) for ages, without thinking it is any big deal.

The basic steps in warm parts of India (which is much of India) are easy:

- boil some milk, say half a liter to 2 liters or so (or it was already boiled for other use and cooled, warm it up some)

- add a spoonful or so of the previous batch of yogurt to it (the starter)

- leave it covered to sit in some place in your house which is at the right temperature for fermentation to not only happen but be facilitated - this could be a cooler part of the house or a warmer part, depending on what climate you live in

- wait for some hours, maybe half a day or so

- eat it

I made a batch as an experiment the morning after I got my Instant Pot Max, and, yeah, that's some mighty fine yogurt. Mine ended up a little bit runny but still tasted amazing! More experimentation needed, but it's a very promising start.

See my comment here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19012171 - and maybe try the low-tech Indian way next time. Proven for centuries, doesn't need fancy gadgets :) Only thing you may need to tweak is the sitting temperature. Either insulate the dish with cloth if ambient temperature is too cold, or put it in a larger vessel of cold water, if too warm.

Like with any other venture worth doing, you have to have the patience to tweak the process some, for your local conditions, which will include local microclimate, kind of milk, kind of starter, etc. But after around 10 or so tries, usually, you should be able to get it right. After that you may only need to tweak it if something (like the season of the year or weather) changes, once in a while.

> some place in your house which is at the right temperature for fermentation to not only happen but be facilitated

Welcome to Saskatchewan, Canada, where there aren't any places in the house that are at the right temperature in the winter :). That's roughly what the Instant Pot does though. You bring it to a boil first, let it cool off, and then it'll keep the pot at the right temperature while it ferments. Nothing special, other than a nice place that's kept around 43degC in a house that's usually around 17degC overnight.

>Welcome to Saskatchewan, Canada, where there aren't any places in the house that are at the right temperature in the winter :).

Ha ha, good one. I stand corrected, probably, if I didn't mention earlier, that the yogurt-making procedure I gave, was specific to the warmer temps of most regions of India. And even some of those regions get pretty cold in winter (at least by sub-tropical country standards).

>a nice place that's kept around 43degC in a house that's usually around 17degC overnight.

Like where I am now, min temp has been 7 C or even 6 C at night lately, and in some places I've been (which are not even in northern India, which is colder), the min has been known to drop to 2 C at times, though rarely. Goes to zero or below, in some places, sometimes, of course.

(I do know that places in the world further north (or south) can get a lot colder, like -40 C (= 40 F) or more.)

I use a sous vide cooker. Put your milk in sealed mason jars and completely submerge them. A little bit of pressure is produced, but not enough to break the jars.

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