Re: Goat Yogurt Cheese - Intro - New here, Dana's sister

[Guest guest]

Hi everyone,

I'm Dana's sister, Donna, and she introduced me to the SCD several

months ago. I don't have celiacs, but I have multiple food and

inhalant allergies, asthma, osteoarthritis, reflux, chronic

recurrent sinus infections, ear infections, bronchitis and yeast

infections. My health had been deteriorating rapidly for the past

few years, and I had been on multiple antibiotics and my body had

stopped responding to all of them. I was getting worse and worse,

with no apparent end in sight. Dana told me that I might want to

give this diet a try because she had heard other members here report

that their allergies and asthma and reflux improved drastically when

they went on SCD for other reasons. At that point, I was at my

wit's end and willing to try anything, so I found the book in town

and started that weekend, on October 28. The first couple of weeks

were rough, but then I really started to feel significantly better.

I wasn't 100% better and was still feeling run down, but it was

nowhere near as bad as before. I've been eating tons of legal

cheeses, and yogurt made with organic cows milk, and Lois Lang bread

with DCCC. Dana has been answering tons of questions for me over

the past several months, and I've been so grateful. I was just

diagnosed with a dairy allergy last week, so all of my cooking and

eating habits are going to have to change.

I bought a yogurt maker and started making my own yogurt and yogurt

cheese, this summer, long before starting SCD because I had heard of

Dana making her family yogurt and it sounded like a great idea. In

October when I was so sick, my local Dr told me to go off dairy for

2 weeks to see if that would make a difference. Unfortunately, I

didn't get better and she did allergy testing that didn't show any

obvious food allergies so she told me to return to a normal diet at

that time. During the dairy free trial in October, I was so

disappointed about the possibility of having to give up yogurt and

yogurt cheese, and Dana suggested I try goat milk and goat yogurt.

I had several failed attempts at the goat yogurt and goat cheese and

was so disappointed. I used Meyenberg goat milk (the only kind

available here), and Progurt starter and the yogurt was extremely

runny and just ran right through my Donvier Yogurt Cheese maker like

water. I tried making yogurt out of store bought soymilk and it

separated and was terrible. I also tried to make yogurt out of rice

milk and that didn't turn out either. (This was all before I had

started SCD, so I was just trying to make yogurt out of any dairy

free liquid I could think of, since I had just invested in the

yogurt maker).

Dana also sent me the nut yogurt recipe from pecanbread and that

attempt was also a miserable failure. I put the almonds and water

in the Vitamix and very little liquid came out. There was a huge

amount of solid almond paste and very little liquid. The

cheesecloth split while I was squeezing it and the almond paste shot

out all over my clothing. The small amount of liquid that I did get

out of that batch did go on to make a small amount of yogurt which

did make cheese and the result was better than all of the other

things I'd tried (goat milk, soy milk, rice milk, store bought

canned coconut milk). But it took a huge amount of almonds to yield

such a tiny amount of cheese, so I might have done something wrong.

I went to another allergy specialist out of state last week in

Alabama (a doctor that my children and I had all gone to for food

allergies several years ago), and he retested me and diagnosed an

allergy to dairy, corn, onion and banana. He put me on Nystatin

long term and also put me on a 2 Day Rotation Diet, where I only eat

each allowed food for one meal in a two day period. He told me to

completely eliminate dairy for 5 days and then eat a LOT of it on

the 6th day to see if I really had an adverse reaction to it.

Yesterday was the day for the dairy challenge, and boy did I ever

confirm that I have major issues with dairy!!! I'm hoping after the

dairy is all cleaned out of my system that I can try to challenge

again with just a bowl of cow yogurt and hopefully I can tolerate a

bowl of yogurt every other day. If I could get the goat yogurt to a

spoonable form and also get it to drip into cheese that I could use

in recipes, it would be nice to be able to eat a bowl of goat yogurt

one day and then have cow yogurt the next. (Or it would be nice to

at least be able to have goat yogurt every other day if the cow

yogurt turns out to be completely out of the question.)

Thanks for listening to my long intro post, and thanks for all the

answers to Dana's goat yogurt cheese question because I want to try

to get the goat cheese to work too!

Donna Self

Allergies, Asthma, Arthritis, Yeast Issues, Chronic Sinus Infections

SCD 2-1/2 months