So how are we going to follow up champagne?
What’s something interesting that, like, people eat?
Should be easier to think of something.
Mmm.
We both eat food.
Hmmm.
This is pretty good.
[Typing sounds].
I’m just not sure yogurt is visually interesting.
Yogurt is just milk that has been curdled by bacteria excrement, it’s great.
Supposedly Ghengis Khan fed it to his troops to make them brave.
Yogurt was really unpopular in the United States.
They bought scientists from Europe to figure out how to get Americans to eat it.
I wonder if Go-gurt is interesting.
Go-gurt?
John Harvey Kellogg recommended yogurt to eat for its health benefits or if you were
looking for rapid results, as an enema.
John Harvey Kellogg the genital mutilator?
He also invented cornflakes.
Greek yogurt has gotten so popular over the past few years, it went from a $60 million
industry in 2005 to a $1.5 billion industry in 2011.
I guess it’s a healthy snack, it’s got a lot of protein, not a lot of fat, not a
lot of sugar.
I know I eat it everyday.
I’ve got a few important relationships in my life, very near the top of the list is
my relationship with my dairy farmer.
Where there is a terroir in wines that are coming from a specific area we’ve really
come to know that seasonally we really need to adjust how we make the yogurt just to have
a consistent product throughout the year.
We are getting this milk three or four hours out of the cow into the farm so it’s just
immaculately fresh.
Most of the country gets their milk through co-ops where you may have 20, 30 different
dairy farms co-mingling their milk so the individual character of the milk really gets
lost in that transition.
If we start 6,000 gallons of milk to make yogurt, we actually end up with about 2,000
gallons of finished greek yogurt.
In this initial process we’re looking to transfer the milk from the 6,000 gallon tanker
to the storage silo and we run refrigerant between the stainless wall of the silo and
the outer jacket which keeps the milk cold.
It legally has to be below 39 degrees before we can pump it into the tanker and the very
first thing we’ll do is what’s called separating the whole raw milk and run it through
a centrifugal separator which spins the milk around at very high speeds, pushes it up through
a series of stacked cones, and cream comes out one side and skim comes out the other.
Once the milk is separated it is pumped into a pasteurizer and, well, pasteurized.
And chart recorders around the facility document that the milk has been legally pasteurized.
We have a blend of 5 different cultures that are blended for us by a dairy house in Madison,
Wisconsin.
Those cultures love to pro-create at 106 degrees fahrenheit.
So we’ll chill the milk down to about 110, pump it into one of the culture tanks and
we will scale out the yogurt cultures, add it to the culture tank, blend it in for about
20 minutes and then you wait.
If a culture time is about 5 hours, it would’t be until the last 20 minutes that the pH meter
would really start moving, registering more acidic as the milk goes from a liquid to a
solid curd, looking something like a block of tofu surrounded by greenish, liquid whey.
There are agitators in the machine and the agitators turned on and it literally breaks
up this giant curd of yogurt and gives an even blend of the curd and whey.
We pump yogurt in one tube, it spins at a very high speed and from one pipe we’ll
get greek yogurt.
Out of another pipe is coming the cloudy green-yellow liquid which is the whey.
We have a specific pH where we want to stop the culture action.
It’s very critical that we get it chilled quickly.
We’ve got what’s called a tube-in-tube heat exchanger, it’s 180 feet of pipe that
as soon as it comes out of the separator it gets pumped in this tube and it goes through
a small one-inch pipe that is surrounded by a two-inch pipe that is surrounded by propylene
glycol, a form of refrigerant that will get as low as about 25 degrees and still flow
and not freeze.
In about 2 and half to three minutes, we drop the temperature from 100 degrees to about
45 degrees.
At that point, if we’re packing off fat-free, plain greek yogurt, that stuff’s ready for
pack-off.
If it’s 2% or whole milk, we will pump it into a mixer, the production manager has a
chart that reads if you want to make 100 cases of whole-milk plain yogurt, pump in 150 kilos
of fat-free plain and add 40 kilos of 40% heavy cream.
The machine that we have now will do about 20 cups a minute.
On the first station it’ll drop a cup into the turntable and if it’s a fruit yogurt,
where we have a separate fruit filling, next station it’ll pump the fruit.
It’ll go to station three and it’ll pump the yogurt on top of the fruit.
A little arm will place a seal on top of the cup, it’ll go to station five and a heat
seal come down and a little bit of adhesive around the rim of the foil seal and on the
last station a little platform comes up and lifts the cup out of the turntable and a flipper
knocks it onto a conveyer belt where the label is put on.
Greek yogurt has gone from a non-entity five years ago to 40-50% of the total yogurt market
as of 2016.
Markets built four or five years ago had only 4 or 5 feet of yogurt in the dairy section.
Markets built today are putting in 40 feet.
It’s become a pretty integral part of my life.
Yeah, I eat a lot of yogurt.
I think it would make a good episode, it seemed visually-interesting enough.
Yeah, definitely.
And we could talk about all the weird, gendered marketing that’s gone on with yogurt over
the years.
All of the like, uuuuuuh.
Yeah and the mmmm.
Euuuuu.
It’s not good.
No, it’s bad.
Uh, I’ve been looking forward to this raspberry cheesecake all day but I obviously can’t
just eat it without obsessing over my caloric intake because I’m a woman.
If I spend an extra half-hour at the gym that’s 150 calories.
If I eat raw kale for dinner tonight and steamed celery for lunch tomorrow that’s 33 calories
plus 27 calories.
I’ve been looking forward to this raspberry cheesecake yogurt all day.
Is that how you stay so skinny and therefore better than me in practically every way.
[Laughs] I didn’t think you noticed.
Maybe I should be eating yogurt too.
Not this terrible dessert that will make me fat because avoiding dessert is the only way
to avoid being fat.
It’s good to have goals.
[Sighs].
This dessert-flavored yogurt not only satisfies my cravings and makes me quantifiably more
attractive, it also helps keep me regular.
Mmm.
A lot of women are too stressed to poop but not me and it’s all thanks to the special
live active cultures int his yogurt.
They’re basically bacteria wizards.
I love you more than sex bacteria wizards.
Yeah, that’s not really true.
No.
I mean the probiotics in yogurt do have positive health benefits if you’ve done something
to upset the balance of bacteria in your gut like uh, like if you’re on antibiotics or
something like that.
And there is that interesting research coming out about the connection between your brain
and your gut, specifically the bacteria in there and how it can impact your mood, your
behavior, your emotions.
Yeah, everything gets wrapped up in there.
That’s something we could talk about.
I wonder how hard it is to make at home.
It seems like it would be difficult.
Like super difficult.
Wait.
That was it?
I thought that there were going to be more steps.
You really just stir it.
Yeah.
Want to go get lunch?
Yeah.
That actually was super easy. Yeah.
And we could have made our own frozen yogurt from our own homemade yogurt.
But we wouldn’t have had all the toppings though.
So that’s pretty much all there is to yogurt I guess.
Did we just make an episode on yogurt?
What if we did frozen yogurt?
Ooh.
Then we could do all the toppings!
Yeah.
The machines would be very interesting.
Oh, I’d bet they’d let us back there right now, they were super nice.
Nah, they were weirded out by all the toppings.
Maybe you could go back in there.
Just tell them I’m sorry.
You made completely rational decisions.
Oh.
I don’t know what that was.
Every bite is an adventure.