Making Homemade Yogurt in a Rice Cooker

After having lots of success making yogurt in my crock pot, I've started feeling selfish.  I have a crock pot, and most people don't.  How will the crockpot-less enjoy fresh, homemade yogurt?  It's basically the same feeling I get when I think about poor kids in North Korea without iPhones.  Such a travesty.

So I set out for alternative methods with the conviction of a Southern Baptist missionary.  Yogurt just needs a warm incubator to ferment for a few hours.  Crock pots work well because of the ceramic insulation that helps keep the yogurt at a relatively constant and warm temperature for 8+ hours.  After clicking around, I found that people use all kinds of crazy methods to incubate.  Oven pilot lights.  Heating pads.  Insulated beach coolers filled with warm water.  Then it occurred to me.  Rice cookers are essentially crock pots.  Everyone in Korea has a rice cooker.  Even if you don't eat rice.  They just come with the apartment.  Eureka~

Homemade Mozzarella

My quest to conquer the art of homemade mozzarella was really the result of some irresponsible YouTubing.  Some random clickity clicks and my latent dairy affinity was piqued.

There are thousands of variations on making mozzarella, and before I knew it I had become one of those freaks reading page after page of mozzarella instructionals and watching unattractive housewives or dairy farmers making mozzarella.  I knew I had reached a low point when I caught myself staring numbly at a goat teat being milked.

Homemade Ricotta Cheese

Everyone has an inner Garfield, and it's sad that mine is stymied by the scarcity and cost of ricotta here in Korea.  Half a pint (250 g) of ricotta goes for a little over 10,000 won.  It also tastes like a bland rubbery paste.

Homemade ricotta tastes decadent, slightly sweet and creamy.  It's also super easy to make.  Any other cheese I've messed up can be turned into ricotta cheese (mozzarella, yogurt that didn't set, etc.).  All my dairy failures find consolation in ricotta form because it's that easy to make.  Ricotta cheese literally translates to cooked milk.  That's all it is with a bit of acid to curdle it.

Homemade Butter

Butter..... (to be read in Paula Dean accent).  Butter is the easiest thing to make (if you have a hand-mixer or blender).  If you don't have either of these things in your kitchen, you're probably one of those people who think margarine is something acceptable to put in one's mouth.  There are a million ways to make butter - blending, beating, mixing, churning, jumping up and down, strapping it to your ass while engaged in adult activities...the possibilities are endless.  You can also culture and sour the cream to get a better flavor or just whip it straight up.   This post is about making butter in Korea.  Only ONE cream works unless you have access to a sack of cow udder.  Denmark Fresh Cream.

Cottage Cheese in Korea

Cottage cheese is nearly impossible to find in Korea.  I've found it once at Haddon Supermarket in Oksu-dong for 15,000 won for a quart (32 fluid ounces) of cottage cheese that disappeared in a day.  I've gone back to Haddon several times since then, and they haven't been stocking it.

Thankfully, cottage cheese is ridiculously easy to make.  You just need white vinegar, milk, cream and salt.  I've found that making cottage cheese isn't cheaper than finding it haphazardly - even at four times the price of what it would cost in the states ($4).  That's because milk and cream are expensive, and 1 gallon of milk only yields two cups of cottage cheese.  Also, white vinegar isn't sold in most supermarkets.  I found white vinegar at the Foreign Mart in Itaewon for about 5,000 won for a quart (32 fl. oz.), but you can get a massive 1.32 gallon jug of the same white vinegar at Costco for 7,500 won.  I also saw it at E-mart the other day.

Making My Own Homemade Yogurt in a Crockpot

There are lots of sites where you can find blog posts, etc. about this, but I thought I'd document how I managed to do it in Korea.  Yogurt only requires milk and bacteria, which can be easily borrowed from a package of existing yogurt.  I taste-tested 5-6 different kinds of plain yogurt, organic and not organic.

WINNER: Denmark Plain Yogurt

It doesn't have a sweet taste from additional sugar that all the other yogurts had, and it has a nice, thick texture which I was hoping would transfer to my own batch of yogurt.  It's also possible to use a yogurt starter to make your own yogurt, but I have no idea where one would get a hold of that in Korea.  And why would you want to go search out something as obscure and difficult to find as yogurt starter when you can go to your local market and just buy some yogurt as starter?