Gertrude Grocer in Fitzroy Melbourne
Friday is known as yogurt day at Schulz Organic Dairy. Why Fridays? Well, to get the right creamy, pot-set consistency we love, we need to use extra fresh organic milk – and on Fridays we can ‘milk and make’ on the same day! If milk is even a couple of days old (still fresh by anyone’s standards!) then the yogurt will most likely turn out runny and will not hold its form, compared with using our fresh organic milk that is milked on the day. This process also ensures that we end up with a more fuller-flavoured and consistently textured yogurt!
So on Fridays, we milk our cows in the mornings and make our pot-set organic Greek and Natural yogurt varieties in the afternoons, all right here on the Schulz Organic Dairy Farm. What a beautiful (and long) day to be a dairy farmer! Additionally, transforming our milk into our delicious dairy products right here on the farm saves our milk being transported in big vats by truck to other facilities, reducing our food miles too.
Taste difference: Our Greek Yogurt is tarter and slightly thicker than our Natural Yogurt.
No preservatives and no added flavours.
How do you make Greek Yogurt? What does Schulz Organic Dairy do differently?
This is where we get technical.
First, we pasteurise our certified organic milk at 80C for a few minutes. This denatures the proteins allowing them to bond together creating a firmer yogurt.
Then, we cool it down to a more tepid temperature, and mix in our strains of cultures: probiotic cultures, acidophilus, bifidus, L. Casein and traditional Greek culture. The inoculation process takes around 20 minutes, and then it’s time to pour, pack, seal, date and weigh!
Once packed, the yogurt heads into an incubator to be held at around 40 degrees overnight after which we gradually lower the temperature down to a typical refrigerator 3-4C over the course of a few hours.
And this incubation is when the magic starts to happen.
During incubation, the cream rises to the top and forms a thick layer. While other dairies homogenise the milk, we believe in offering the whole product as nature intended. As we don’t add stabilisers or gelatine to any of our products, the whey liquid also remains in the pot, sitting just below the creamy top layer. The whey is one of the best bits of all – you can stir-it back through the yogurt, drink it, or do what Simon does and add it to a juice for a health kick. It’s good for you!
By the time we get back in on Monday, the yogurt is all ready to go. Once the pots reach 4C or cooler, the yogurt is considered ‘pot-set’ and is ready to sell at our Farmgate Cafe, through retailers and in big tubs to our food service customers.
Product Sizes:
Retail - 500g and 1kg tub
Food Service - 4kg and 10kg
Our Friesian and Jersey girls get to roam the green paddocks after milking