How is Frozen Yogurt Made?

If you Google this question, usually you get various recipes on how to make frozen yogurt at home. This usually means adding some sugar to a shop-bought yogurt and sticking it in the freezer. Clearly, on a commercial scale, this is not how frozen yogurt is made!

So how does Plas Farm make its frozen yogurt?

First, we mix the ingredients together in a large tank. The ingredients vary, depending on the type of fro yo (soft serve, retail, organic, for smoothies, etc), but typically consist of a combination of some of the following; milk, cream, milk powders, sugar, inulin and stabilisers.

Once they’re all mixed up into a milky base mix, we pasteurise at 75C for 10 minutes, to get rid of any nasties.

We then cool the whole lot down to about 40C, and pass the mix over into a culturing tank. This is where the magic happens. We add the yogurt cultures into the mix, and let it culture for 12-14 hours. This is when the lactose in the milk becomes lactic acid, forming the yogurt.

We typically use lactic cultures with four different bacteria, and our standard products contain streptococcus thermophilus, lactobacillus bulgaricus, lactobacillus acidophilus, and bifidobacterium lactis. However, we can also produce yogurts, kefirs, lassis and all sorts of other cultured milk products with different bacterial cultures.

After about 12 hours, the yogurt mix is then cooled further, before any flavouring items are added to it (fruit purees, caramels, green tea, fruit juices, cocoa, etc). The mix is then ready to pack, either through a continuous freezer, for retail, scooping or smoothie frozen yogurt, or through liquid fillers for soft serve frozen yogurt.

The final product is then sent into giant blast freezers to get it really cold, ready for storage in a storage freezers.

Sounds so simple, doesn’t it? But trust us, it took years of practise to get Plas Farm’s frozen yogurt just right!