What food do you miss when you're away from home?

An Instant Pot has a pretty darned secure lid (one of its avatars is the Pressure Cooker, after all). So I'm not much worried about spillage, only about whether the usual car motion would interfere with the yogurt setting.

 

I'm curious if it'll wind up more like custard, which gets a lot of its texture from lots of stirring and circulation with gradual temperature change.

 

The reaction is already in motion. I actually don't think the sloshing from the car motion will be strong enough to thoroughly mix it. Too much air getting into the mix could disturb the bacteria, but the motion should be a problem otherwise.

Worse case, you get kefir?

 

A bit of respiratory-virus isolation is restricting me to stationary yogurt experiments for the time being.

As far as I can tell, Kroger has discontinued their four-pound ziploc bag of dry milk. There is Gordon Food Service here, which has five-pound bags (without the zip feature ... can be transferred into ~ 2½ half-gallon canning jars and vacuum sealed).

The GFS milk includes 'silicon dioxide' for anti-caking. I had never really noticed the Kroger milk caking, but ok.

Never tried making yogurt with sand before, but it seems to turn out all right.

 

silicon dioxide is not water soluble during human lifetimes so you could add a filtration step. If you care. I'd not.

 

I appreciate a good meatball. Not on many local menus, and the markets sell half-filler versions that bounce high, but are not right. So dang it, I went to Walmart (who actually clean their meat grinders frequently) for beef and pork 'mince' and DIY. New Year's self care. Results get 'chef's kiss'. Compatible with S. Euro tomato sauce or N. Euro cream sauce, if one's arteries have yet to close completely off.

 

Ok, it seems for road-trip Instant Pot yogurt you get about 80% of the usual yield, with the rest sloshing around on top as unappetizing cloudy whey.

Pour that off and the yogurt seems ok, maybe with a mouthfeel a little more silty than creamy.

80% yield may still be economical compared to store-bought, but incubating while driving might remain an option of last resort.

 

For whatever reason, the Kroger / PayLess here has never resumed carrying those larger bags of dry milk.

But Meijer has them. And without the silicon dioxide, just like the Kroger stuff I used before.

I think I'm going to stop using the GFS stuff with the sand. It made perfectly decent yogurt, but every time I poured the milk powder (from bag to jar, jar to measuring cup, cup to pot) was accompanied by a big ol' cloud of superfine dust that I was no doubt breathing. It must have been the sand component. The old Kroger milk powder never did that, and the Meijer powder doesn't. And I don't notice any 'caking' issues. I really don't get why the sand is in the GFS stuff.

 

HI-specific saimin like Sun or S&S, back when could indulge. Mostly Local Hawaiian foods common here but hard to get (at least 15y ago) on mainland even close to the real deal: lau-lau; good sour poi; actually buried imu stove-cooked kalua pork and butterfish; mangoes (Hayden and Common -- Lahaina used to have a specific valley water source feeding trees along the drainage canal that's been torn up for decades, never found a mango off-island yet that can match the taste); Tasaka Guri-Guri.

Also, some Maui flavours from yutes can't be had anymore, even on Maui: Hop Wo Store pickled lemons; Whaler's Market Place dill pickles in the barrel; Chart House steak and lobster; Nashiwa Bakery guava cake; fresh ogo seaweed picked right from the rocks off Wahikuli Beach Park; gaffed owama, vana urchins and opihi shellfish off Olowalu Beach. All these things no longer exist, and can never come back, lost forever... like most of the things my gen enjoyed as tree-climbing, spearfishing, dial-phone-using kids