I never shut up when I succeed, but sometimes I fail fabulously as well. Let’s dig in, shall we?

A friend asked if I could teach her to make yogurt, the trick being that she lives now as a vegan. I took this as a challenge, like when I’ve had to fight my way out of a restroom or read my site stats here on cryptic WordPress. To the grocery store, then, away!

To follow my glorious failure, you will need:
a large can of coconut milk
a can of coconut cream
a small container of coconut yogurt
one envelope of liquid pectin

It’s important to remember we’re in the experimental stage and don’t want to spend A MILLION DOLLARS on failed recipes. Let’s fail cheap! Recipes for coconut yogurt use tapioca starch or gelatin. Gelatin is not vegan, so that’s out. I happened to have liquid pectin in the cheater envelopes because I’m a desperate woman. So I went with what I had.

I started reading about the process of making coconut yogurt with limited infodata but with the certainty that no method I could come up with would kill anyone. That inspires confidence.

So I heated coconut milk and coconut cream and added an envelope of liquid pectin. My kitchen thermometer is trying to die, but I don’t let that stop me. No, I stir constantly and the temp rises faster than I expect because the coconut starts at room temperature and my kitchen is not air conditioned. The spoon tells me when the pectin likes the temperature and begins thickening. I let the temperature go to just above 170 and turned off the heat. Unlike animal milks, coconut milk doesn’t form a skin when the scientist doesn’t stir, but cooling occurs more quickly when stirring breaks surface tension. I stirred some and let it go some, and when the mixture cooled to 110, I added the yogurt starter and popped the bowl into my yogurt heating contraption, which is an old metal roasting pan lined with dinner napkins and resting on a heating pad set on medium. Twelve hours passed. In the morning, I was sad to see the mixture appeared not at all thick. I put it in the fridge and forgot about it.

This evening, a funny thing happened: Pete tasted the coconut mixture and mentioned the crazy flavor.

Tata: Let’s drop that into the ice cream machine and dance like it’s New Year’s Eve.
Pete: Okay.

I suggested raspberries. Pete said no. I said grilled pineapple. Pete said maybe. As I watched Pete out the coconut mixture into the ice cream machine, I realized the coconut cream didn’t belong there and the texture without it was probably pretty good. Pete added Amaretto di Saronno and brought me a taste. I almost could not believe my mouth. It was unbelievable, even for my mouth.

As yogurt goes, it was a failure. As frozen yogurt goes, it is a complete, crazy success. I gotta think!