yoghurt

Hannah can barely contain her excitement. "Look," she says, handing me a tiny covered plastic pot. "Golddust!"

I'm wary. Golddust? The pot weighs virtually nothing. Has my neighbour branched into the illegal mineral trade that's wreaking havoc in eastern Zimbabwe?

This afternoon a man approached me at the supermarket in the border city of Mutare. "I have an item to sell," he whispered. Did he mean corn-meal, cooking oil, bread, jam, a tray of eggs -- all of which are in short supply in Zimbabwe?

"A diamond," he said impatiently. I told him that wasn't the kind of item I was interested in buying.

Now Hannah is offering me golddust.

"Not real golddust," she says affectionately. "Yoghurt culture, of course."

She and I have been plotting for weeks to get some yoghurt culture so we can make our own yoghurt.

Like many other foodstuffs, yoghurt isn't readily available in Zimbabwe. In the early days of the economic crisis, the state Dairibord milk company still managed to pump out sachets of pink, green and yellow drinking yoghurt. Those sachets are hard to find now, much to my four-year old's disappointment.

I’ve never been too keen on drinking yoghurt.

To me yoghurt is the voluptuously-smooth veloute I used to eat late after work in a tiny Paris kitchen in my 20s. Sometimes it was topped with a velvety prune compote. Better still, yoghurt is the thick and creamy stuff my mother made when I was growing up in eastern England.

Dad bought Mum a yoghurt maker for Christmas one year. It was a small brown glass tank. Six glass pots fitted snugly inside. Every few days Mum filled the pots with her yoghurt mixture, snapped the lid on the tank, wrapped it in a blanket and slid it among her freshly-ironed pillow cases in the airing cupboard, under the hot water tank.

For a few hours the yoghurt matured in the gentle heat of Mum's sheets. Then Mum unwrapped the tank, pulled out the pots and stacked them in the ‘fridge, ready for breakfast the next day.

My father liked to stir in spoonfuls of dark brown Muscovy sugar. The granules never dissolved properly so the yoghurt had a speckled look, like birds' eggs.

Hannah has managed to get her hands on some Greek yoghurt from South Africa, which we'll use as a culture. We have the other vital ingredient: a litre of milk. But now a new problem presents itself. Neither Hannah nor I have an airing cupboard. And Zimbabwe's shaky power-supply means hot water tanks rarely stay hot for long. How are we going to make our yoghurt?

We ask around. An elderly friend suggests putting the yoghurt in a polystyrene box to mature. We'll need to wrap the box in towels and leave it somewhere warm for the yoghurt to be a success, she says.

Mum has a brainwave.

"Use a thermos flask," she says in an email. "Make only a small quantity at a time so you don't have to worry if your 'fridge isn't working."

YOGHURT

Rinse out a thermos flask with boiling water.

Bring 500 ml full-cream milk to just below boiling point. Take the saucepan off the heat when the first bubbles appear, otherwise you'll get a "burnt milk" taste.

Stir in two teaspoons of yoghurt culture. Pour into flask. Leave for six hours. Pour into four (pre-sterilised) cups, reserving two teaspoons of yoghurt to make your next batch.
Refrigerate overnight. Serve nature or with honey.