The basic idea is the same as making dairy yogurt: Add yogurt bacteria to coconut milk, then incubate at a low temperature for about 10 to 12 hours. (I use an old electric heating pad set on low, tucked down into a bowl to hold it up around the yogurt container.)
For the most part, the results are thinner than dairy yogurt—even pourable—but do have a “yogurty” flavor. I have found that the canned organic coconut milk with guar thickener added makes a somewhat thicker, more consistent yogurt than homemade coconut milk, but guar is not paleo kosher.
Linda Vander Voort, who tested recipes for me, figured out that adding 1 tablespoon (14 g) unflavored gelatin to 2 cans’ worth of coconut milk—that’s 28 fluid ounces (825 ml), a little over 3 cups—creates a thicker, spoonable Cocoyo.
I tried it, and it works nicely. If you’d like to do this, pour your coconut milk into a saucepan and sprinkle the gelatin powder on top. Slowly heat to hottest-tap-water temperature, and whisk the gelatin in till there are no lumps. Let it cool before you add your yogurt culture.
While canned coconut milk is sterile, homemade coconut milk must be heated before culturing, to kill any less-than-friendly germs. You don’t want to culture them along with the good ones. Again, getting your coconut milk to about the same temperature as the hottest possible tap water should do fine. Add the gelatin as you do this. Again, cool before adding culture.
I tried several cultures for making Cocoyo. Originally, I used Yogourmet yogurt culture, purchased at my local health food store. This worked well and yielded the tartest, most yogurty results.
However, Yogourmet contains milk powder and a little sugar, making it, too, not paleo kosher. I tried culturing a second batch using the first (sometimes called “serial yogurting”) and it worked very well, yielding a similar result. The quantity of milk and sugar in the second-generation Cocoyo would be small indeed.
It is my experience that you can only take serial yogurting so far. After four or five iterations, you start to get weird results, and the only solution is to start again with fresh culture. If you initially used Yogourmet or a similar product, you would have to accept that every now and then you’d have a batch that included a little milk and sugar.
I tried a dairy-free yogurt culture I ordered online, called GI ProStart. I was unimpressed with the results, which barely tasted any different from plain coconut milk. I prefer a tarter Cocoyo.
I also tried using dairy and sugar-free probiotic capsules from the health food store, pulling them apart and adding the contents to my coconut milk. It did not work; I noticed no change after culturing. It may be that I got a dead batch of probiotics, I suppose; I have had success in the past making dairy yogurt by this method.
Finally, I tried using So Delicious brand coconut yogurt as a starter. This worked pretty well and eliminated the dairy found in the Yogourmet. Why not just use the So Delicious coconut milk yogurt?
It, too, has ingredients that are not paleo kosher, including tapioca maltodextrin and rice starch. Again, using a tablespoon (15 g) or two (30 g) as culture for your own Cocoyo will yield a product with near-homeopathic levels of nonpaleo-kosher ingredients, especially by the second iteration.
I should warn you that often I have made Cocoyo that was uninspiring when first incubated, sort of gray and watery, but that improved vastly with a few days’ chilling. Knowing this will keep you from throwing away a perfectly good batch of Cocoyo in disgust because it looks sort of funny. Chill it, then see.
Despite all this futzing around, I find Cocoyo to be a very useful ingredient to have around the kitchen, especially for sauces, salad dressings, and the like. I urge you to find a coconut milk and a culture you like. Once you’ve discovered this, making Cocoyo is very simple and takes almost no hands-on time.
