i am far from being a germ freak. i am one that actually believes that our world is far to sanitary, kids don’t play in the dirt enough and our world’s dependence on “anti-bacterial” products is partially responsible for killing the good bacteria our bodies need.
with that said, the thought of fermenting & culturing my own food sort of freaked me out at first. my first though was something like this: “you want me to sit things out on my counter to spoil and then feed them to my precious children?’” obviously, i have lost that fear, as making yogurt, water kefir and fermented veggies are now regular staples in our household.
but when i first started, one of my big questions was, “how do you know, when fermenting actually, goes bad?” i read a ton of info on different ways to make yogurt before i began and people would always say it is common sense, obvious signs are really off smell, or visible pink or grey weird surface. curious what that, pink or grey weird surface looks like?” well, i’ll show you.
here is a good yogurt
here is a bad yogurt (with obvious growth on the surface). i know, it’s gross looking.
so what did i do to make this batch go bad? really it was an “i know better than that” mistake. i typically am pretty careful about always sanitizing my jars/tools etc. before creating any fermented food, but this last time as i got my jars ready, i noticed some, stuck on junk in the bottom of one of the jars. so i grabbed a dish sponge (so, not germ free) and wiped the residue out. sure enough, that jar got contaminated with bad bacteria as it cultured. in all of my batches of yogurt, i have only ever had 2 little jars go bad (which is pretty good odds).
happy yogurt making!
