Homemade yogurt: how to dose the natural flavors?

Have you started making homemade yogurt and are looking to flavor your delicious dairy desserts? Discover how to dose natural flavors for your traditional yogurts and other homemade yogurts to drink!

If you are a fan of homemade food, you have probably already used natural food flavors to delicately flavor your preparations - cookies, drinks, pastries, confectionery or even ice cream and yogurt. According to European legislation, natural flavors are ingredients of plant origin, produced by concentration, distillation, extraction, fermentation or roasting. They can be essential oils, floral waters and distillate flavors (such as rose or lavender), extracts or concentrates. Whether you like fruity flavors, floral flavors, spicy flavors or the scent of herbs, you're sure to find something to suit your taste! Having natural flavors in your cupboards allows you to have certain flavors at hand even when they are not in season, for fruits for example.

Find the right dosage

To properly dose your natural flavor for your homemade yogurt, you need to identify the type of flavor you want to use. When you start using flavors, you can follow the recommendations given, then you can gradually let your creativity speak for itself, adding a few drops and tasting as you go. The Nerolian teams have developed a classic dosage, which corresponds to 0.5% of natural flavoring of the total weight of your preparation. Thus, for 1 liter of milk, start with 0.5 ml of flavoring (1 teaspoon corresponds to 4 ml and 1 tablespoon corresponds to 10 ml). For 1 kilogram of another preparation, use 0.5 grams. As not all flavors have the same intensity, this dosage can be increased to 1 to 10% of the flavoring addition depending on the desired result. Indeed, a strong flavor like mint will need to be used more carefully than a mandarin or chocolate flavor, which is milder. Strawberry flavoring, for example, should be dosed between 3 and 5% of the preparation, while violet flavoring will be incorporated more weakly, up to 0.1%.

Where to find natural flavors?

You can find flavors of all kinds online, especially on the website of Nerolian, a family business specializing in natural and vegan flavors, based in Grasse, Provence. The advantage is that the formats offered, which range from 50 ml to 1 liter, are suitable for both individuals and professionals. Natural flavors are also sold in some supermarkets, in organic stores or in large household appliance stores.

Using natural flavors in your homemade yogurt

To bring out the full flavor of your natural flavors in your homemade yogurt, add them, in the recommended amount, to your preparation just before putting it in your yogurt maker - or in the oven or pressure cooker. Don't hesitate to taste the mixture and adjust the quantity according to your preferences.

What about other products?

The dosage doesn't just depend on the flavoring, it also depends on the preparation you are going to incorporate it into. For example, do not hesitate to slightly increase the natural flavors in cakes and other pastries. Indeed, a long cooking time tends to reduce the flavor of the flavor.