Yogurt, also spelled yoghurt, yogourt or yoghourt, is a food produced by bacterial fermentation of milk. The bacteria used to make yogurt are known as yogurt cultures. Fermentation of sugars in the milk by these bacteria produces lactic acid, which acts on milk protein to give yogurt its texture and tart flavor. The word is derived from Turkish: yoğurt, and is usually related to the verb yoğurmak.
About Yogurt in brief
Yogurt, also spelled yoghurt, yogourt or yoghourt, is a food produced by bacterial fermentation of milk. The bacteria used to make yogurt are known as yogurt cultures. Fermentation of sugars in the milk by these bacteria produces lactic acid, which acts on milk protein to give yogurt its texture and characteristic tart flavor. The word is derived from Turkish: yoğurt, and is usually related to the verb yoğurmak, or \”to be curdled or coagulated; to thicken”; it may be related to yoğun, meaning thick or dense. The origins of yogurt are unknown, but it is thought to have been invented in Mesopotamia around 5000 BC. Some accounts suggest that Mughal Indian emperor Akbar’s cooks would flavor yogurt with mustard seeds and cinnamon. Until the 1900s, yogurt was a staple in diets of people in the Russian Empire, South Eastern Europe, Central Europe and the Indian subcontinent. In 1907, a Bulgarian student of medicine examined the bacterium Bacillus bulgaricus and found it to be a rod-like acid-producing bacteria. In 1905, Bulgarian student Stamen Grigorov described it as consisting of a spherical and a rod like bacterium called Bacillus flora. The earliest yogurts were probably spontaneously fermented by wild bacteria in goat skin bags. In ancient Indian records, the combination of yogurt and honey is called \”the food of the gods\”. Persian traditions hold that \”Abraham owed his fecundity and longevity to the regular ingestion of yogurt\”.
The cuisine of ancient Greece included a dairy product known as oxygala which was similar to yogurt. In modern Turkish the letter ğ marks a diaeresis between two vowels, without being pronounced itself, which is reflected in some languages’ versions of the word. In English, the several variations of the spelling of theword include yogurt, yoghur, and to a lesser extent yoghour or yogourt. Some countries require yogurt to contain a certain amount of colony-forming units of bacteria; in China, for example, the requirement for the number of lactobacillus bacteria is at least 1 million CFU per milliliter. In French clinical history: Francis I suffered from a severe diarrhea which no French doctor could cure. His ally Suleiman the Magnificent sent a doctor who allegedly cured the patient with yogurt. French king Francis I was grateful, the French king spread the information about the food that he had cured him of the disease. In Greek: oxyGala was consumed with honey, similar to the way thickened Greek yogurt is eaten today. In English: YOGurt, the word ğ was traditionally rendered as \”gh\” in transliterations of Turkish from around 1615–1625. It may be homogenized or not. The milk used may be pasteurized or raw. Each type of milk produces substantially different results. Milk is first heated, usually to about 85 °C, to denature the milk proteins so that they do not form curds.
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This page is based on the article Yogurt published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 04, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
