Sleepless Nights

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  • The Year Of Making: Homemade Yogurt

    A while back I spoke here about my year of making things from scratch, and how I planned to turn it into a series. Shortly thereafter, I got sick, fell apart, got exhausted and only managed to claw myself back to a semblance of humanity when I realised, hey maybe I ought to start taking my iron supplements again.

    MAGIC ENERGY APPEARS.

    I’ve felt much less like dying, and so here is my first post in the series.

    Making Yogurt From Scratch

    It’s pretty easy actually.

    You’ll need:

    UHT milk
    Powdered milk
    A tub of starter yogurt
    Sugar (optional)

    A container (1 litre is perfect)
    something to insulate with.

    001

    I use my EasiYo yogurt maker thingy, just because it’s the perfect size and it comes with a handy dandy insulating thermos.

    Take your container and half fill it with milk.

    UHT milk is best apparently, because then you don’t have to worry about heating and cooling the milk.

    002

    004

    If you’re using sugar, add it now. I added 1TB to make it sweeter for the kids, but also made a blueberry sauce. Mix with a whisk until the sugar is dissolved, and then add powdered milk.

    Powdered milk helps to thicken the yogurt, so if you like thicker yogurt, add more. I usually add about a cup to add extra fat for Evelyn. Especially as yogurt is one of the few dairy products she can tolerate.

    005

    Whisk the powdered milk in until you’ve got no lumps. Double check for sugar at the bottom, and whisk more if you need to.

    Now add your yogurt starter. Usually I juse use a few tablespoons from my finishing tub of yogurt, but I got distracted and the last few tablespoons of yogurt went sour in the fridge, so I bought this:

    007

    Make sure you pick a yogurt starter that you both like the flavour of AND contains live culture. Check the ingredients. Without the live culture, you’re just making a mess.

    Now, add water to your thermos/water bath/insulating place.

    I use the thermos that came with my EasiYo maker, but I’ve heard of people using warming cupboards, or pots of water with the lid left on. All kinds of things.

    The goal is to start with your water around 60C, and then to hold the temperature around 50C for a few hours to let the yogurt cultures do their work.

    008

    If it’s too hot, your yogurt will curdle. Too cold and the bacteria get sleepy and stop working (technical term).

    009

    Put everything to bed for a few hours. Mine took around 5 hours with the temps staying around 50C the whole time. Your mileage may vary, so for the first time, it’s probably better to start the yogurt in the morning on a day you’re home all day so you can check it. Once you’ve got your technique down, you can do it overnight.

    The longer you leave your yogurt in the thermos, the stronger the flavour will be. I like a good sour yogurt but the rest of my family doesn’t, so this one is super mild.

    004 (2)

  • Starting a business, and chocolate lip balm

    I made another two lip balms today. One chocolate, using real chocolate, and the other using olive oil.

    I wanted to see if the olive oil flavour comes through (it does) and whether I hate it (unconvinced yet). It might be better with a light olive oil, but I’ve only got extra virgin in the house, because that’s what was on special.

    The chocolate lip balm however, after quite a bit of tweaking, is delicious. It was quite draggy and heavy after the first recipe and I didn’t like it.

    But now? It’s divine.

    I’ll post the recipe in a few days once I’ve done some more tweaking. I’d like to try using dark chocolate insted of milk, and cutting out the rice bran oil, which I found a bit heavy. Sunflower oil seems like a better oil for lip balms at this stage, until I can get hold of some apricot kernel oil, or avocado oil for testing.

    I was going to use sweet almond oil, but decided being nut free in all my recipes was probably safer. Amy has friends with nut allergies and the last thing I want to do is introduce sweet almond oil into a lip balm and cause a reaction in a child.

    Plus, it’s about brand trust isn’t it. If I use nut oils in my soaps/balms, then I rule out a number of people who might buy from me.

    So, nut free.

    Because I’m heavily in the middle of testing recipes and seriously considering turning soaps and lip balms into a business venture, I wrote about my process of thinking for Money Circle. You should read it. I probably got a bit ranty about poverty, but that’s nothing new.

    Coming up tomorrow: Making yogurt from scratch.

  • Castile vs Castile, and lip balm

    Some times, days just go as planned. Today was one of those days.

    First I made another Castile soap – 100% olive oil, unscented, uncoloured – and put it in the fridge to prevent gel. It’s an identical recipe to the Castile I made on Sunday, only Sunday’s soap was insulated to encourage a fast saponification.

    The differences between gelling and not gelling are endlessly interesting. Sunday’s soap hardened within two hours, gelled within six and was unmoulded and cut within 10 hours.

    Today’s soap has been in the fridge for seven hours now and is still thickened liquid, similar to lotion or partially whipped cream. It took five hours before it was stiff enough to pattern the top with a chopstick and have the pattern hold.

    It’s not a concern – it’s possible it will have to stay in its mould for a week before the chemical reaction has advanced enough to make everything hard enough and safe enough to handle.

    I’m keeping notes. The plan was to compare the texture of an ungelled soap with a gelled soap so I know which I prefer. So far most of my soaps have gelled, now I need a control batch so I can choose.

    I also probably need another half a dozen moulds and postage/couriers to be faster, but details.

    Secondly, I made lip balm.

    I know. BOW DOWN.

    It was awesome.

    I only made a small test batch, around 3 teaspoons worth, but I think I’m in love. It feels so lovely on my lips and I can’t wait to add colours and flavours and see how that changes things.

    Beeswax though, man, that stuff. Nathan has been given a job as the official beeswax-hacker-into-pieces-er. It is hard stuff to hack away at. I’m glad I only needed a little bit to melt and sieve, not great chunks of it.

    My beeswax is a creamy white, unlike the bright yellows of the beeswax I see for sale online. Further research (and a quick email to the Tasmanian Beekeepers Society where the wax originated from) confirmed the whiter wax is a byproduct of the flowers the bees were collecting from at the time.

    Big relief. I worried for a (very short amount of) time that the wax had been chemically filtered. No.

    So, soap and lip balm. All around it was a good day.

  • All the beeswax belongs to me. ALL OF IT

    I’ve been tossing around the idea of adding lip balms to my soapy mix. Amy adores lip gloss, I’m rather a fan of good quality balms and they just look fun to make.

    But first I had to source some beeswax. I wanted Tasmanian wax if I could get it – both for label appeal and lowering of my costs/product miles. Luckily, a neighbour of Frogpondsrock had begun keeping bees. We asked. Could I possibly buy some beeswax?

    No. Absolutely not. He wouldn’t accept a cent for it – but he’d love some soap as a swap.

    DONE.

    Then today, Natasha up at 3 Window Gallery in Oatlands gave me 8kg of Tasmanian beeswax. I’m pretty sure this is just because she’s awesome.

    Now I’m sitting here, smelling the beeswax on the table behind me and plotting how I can use all the wax in all the products.

    Tasmanian people are amazing when you’re getting your feet underneath you. Kind, and generous, and all around pretty amazing people.

    Nathan put up a new shelf in the hallway for curing soaps to sit in the warm dry air. I filled it up immediately, emptying the linen cupboard of its soap, ready for more making. Evelyn ran around my feet, requesting to smell all the soaps and nodding wisely at the smells.

    Isaac smells the soaps too. Picks his favourites. Turns up his nose at a lot. He’s a fan of the essential oil blend soaps, not the stronger fragrance oil soaps. Amy doesn’t care, she loves them all. My favourite is a honey lemon and oat soap which Isaac says smells like biscuits, screwing up his nose in disgust. It’s funny, I thought he liked biscuits. I have to keep stopping to smell it I like it that much.

    I made a castile soap yesterday. 100% olive oil, it was luxurious to work with. I set it to gel, watching while it went rock hard faster than I believed possible. The top looks like plastic now, and I’m glad I’ve got recipe notes, because it was unexpected and interesting and amazing.

    I wanted to recreate the soap today, instead preventing gel. A slower process of saponification, I wanted to compare the results. But then my soap making bowl fell off the bathroom counter, cracking. It was empty, thankfully. No more larger batches of soap until I get to the second hand shop to shop for plastic mixing bowls and old saucepans. I’ve got 8kg of beeswax to melt and sieve free of bees legs and there’s no way I’m using my regular cooking pots for that.

    This week is lip balm testing week while I pin down the ratios I like best. My bathroom is full of oils. I found a bulk supplier of coconut oil for less than half of what I’d been paying – Tasmanian based as a bonus. We’re doing this thing, in our tiny house, in our tiny kitchen, with our non-existent start up budget.

    It’s so much fun.

    Nathan shakes his head at me as I obsessively talk about soaps and oils and labels and things I want to do and try. I spent a day at Salamanca market, reading ingredient lists, scratching my head and trying to work out the disingenuous marketing. No one wants to talk about their products. No one wants to talk about ingredients. I asked at one stall, which oils had been used to make a carpet scrubbing soap. It felt like palm and coconut, but I wanted to be certain. She wouldn’t tell me.

    It’s odd. I don’t want to be like that. I want people to know what’s in my soap, to see the processes, to know why I choose the way I do. I don’t like secrecy, or trying to hide products. I want to be open, honest. I want to be proud enough of my products to believe in every single ingredient, standing behind the choices I make.

    I also am determined to be palm oil free. I won’t buy soap if it contains palm and I don’t intend to start using it in my recipes ever – no matter how people extol the virtues. I can get the same virtues elsewhere thank you, and without the guilt.

    Soap making is addictive.

    People keep asking when I’m going to start selling soap. Firstly, I need to make sure my recipes hold up under a number of conditions. This takes months, not weeks. Secondly, there’s Government red tape to wade through. Making soap to sell is considered chemical manufacturing and I need a license and accreditation. I need to be accountable.

    This isn’t a fast process and I don’t plan on hurrying it up. There’s testing and checking and rejigging and more testing to happen.

    But I truly hope you’ll read along while I do it, because I don’t think there’s anything to gain by hiding what my processes are.

  • How I ended up running my hands up and down a large phallic object repeatedly, while my husband laughed

    I made soap the other day using PVC pipe as moulding.

    It will be FINE I thought. I’ll grease them well. What could go wrong? I’ve done it before. NO DRAMAS.

    HAHAHAHAAA.

    Ahem.

    So, there I was, two pipes filled with soap, cooled and hardened enough to handle.

    I tapped them on the sink. Nothing. I shook them. Nope. I pushed my palm up against the bit I could reach. Not going to happen.

    Whose idea was it to buy pipe my fist can’t fit in? Tell me that.

    (It was mine)

    So I put the pipes in the freezer for a few hours. This is not going to be a problem. I thought. Freeze for two hours, hot water on the outside of the pipe, little push, voila!

    Two hours later, I was at the sink running hot water over the pipe, trying deperately to keep hold of everything while my gloves got slicker and slicker. Using a shampoo bottle (DON’T JUDGE ME) I got the soap moving. Like a giant push pop, up it came. But slowly, so slowly. And it was hard work.

    Now, yes. I should have stopped right there, left everything alone for another 24 hours. But I am impatient, and I pick at things and poke at them until everything explodes.

    So I kept pushing.

    This is where the problem arose. With the soap three quarters emerged from the pipe and still determined to stick, I ran out of leverage. My shampoo bottle was not long enough to push the entire thing out.

    Nathan came into the bathroom as I was considering my options.

    “Would you like some help?”

    Only twenty minutes ago HONEY, I growled inside my head.

    “Please.”

    And that’s when it happened.

    Nathan, taking a firm grasp of the pipe held it out to me. Soap, like a giant tentacle emerging from the end.

    My gloves were slick as I pulled the soap cylinder. And over and over my hands slipped, until I found an excellent rhythm, reminiscent of masturbating a giant zucchini.

    Thirty seconds later, and with a slight pop, my soap emerged, looking hardly the worse for wear.

    I smoothed the edges, white lather foaming around my gloves.

    Nathan couldn’t help it.

    He laughed and laughed and laughed.

    And that’s when I realised I needed a better way to remove soap from pvc piping.

    —

    If you’re keeping track, I had soap in 2 moulds, and have successfully managed to remove the soap from 1 mould. Using the power of mathematics I can prove to you this equals one soap mould still full and steadfastly refusing to give up its treasure.

    Whose idea was this?