Yogurt
Yogurt is milk that friendly bacteria have soured and thickened, and it may be the oldest convenience food we have. Nobody invented it; it kept happening,…
Yogurt is milk that friendly bacteria have soured and thickened, and it may be the oldest convenience food we have. Nobody invented it; it kept happening, to herders in different places, whenever warm milk met the right microbes 12. Behind every pot sits a story of nomads, kings, scientists and immigrant kitchens.
Background
The word is Turkish. English borrowed it in the 1620s from Ottoman Turkish yogurt, from a root meaning roughly "to condense" or thicken 3.
Bulgaria gave the process its most famous microbe. In 1904 Stamen Grigorov, a Bulgarian student at the medical university in Geneva, carried a clay pot of homemade yogurt (a rukatka) back to his lab. Within a year he had identified the bacterium that ferments it, later named Lactobacillus bulgaricus in honour of his country 1. His home village, Studen Izvor, now has a museum devoted to yogurt 1.
Commercial yogurt still follows the old home method. One Bulgarian dairy pasteurises its milk at 96°C, cools it to 43.5°C, adds the starter and leaves it about six hours to set 1.
History
Most stories start with milk carried in animal skins. The usual theory: herders stored milk in bags of goat skin or stomach, a camel's body warmth or a hot climate did the rest, and refilling the bag with fresh milk restarted the ferment 2. Some writers place the discovery around 10,000 years ago, soon after people domesticated sheep and goats in the Fertile Crescent; others point to Central Asia, the Caucasus or Turkey 2. Many Bulgarians say their nomadic ancestors found it about 4,000 years ago, but an ethnologist at the University of Plovdiv told the BBC that yogurt was likely discovered in many places at many times 1.
The legends are better than the evidence. One tale has Genghis Khan making fermented milk a soldier's staple after it revived an envoy 2. Another says France's King Francis I, plagued by a stubborn bowel complaint, sent to the Ottoman sultan for help and received a physician, a flock of sheep and a secret recipe, which seemed to cure him 2.
Science did. Russian biologist Élie Metchnikoff, a Nobel Prize winner, took up Grigorov's work, and his 1908 book The Prolongation of Life linked long-lived Bulgarian peasants with their yogurt habit. A health craze swept Western Europe 1. Isaac Carasso, a merchant from Thessaloniki, began making yogurt in Barcelona and named the brand Danone after his son Daniel in 1919; the first pots sold in pharmacies 2.
In the United States, yogurt arrived with Armenian immigrants. Sarkis and Rose Colombosian started Colombo & Sons Creamery in their Andover, Massachusetts, farmhouse in 1929, cooking the first batches on a woodstove from Rose's Armenian recipe and delivering glass jars by horse and wagon. By 1975 Colombo was America's best-selling plain yogurt 4.
Customs, rules and rituals
Every yogurt culture has its own house style. Bulgarians put it on nearly everything: in tarator, a cold soup with cucumber, walnuts and herbs, and in snezhanka, a cucumber, garlic and dill salad 1. One Sofia local told the BBC he eats three pots a day, and that his grandmother passed off yogurt with jam as "ice-cream" 1.
Across the Indian subcontinent, lassi comes sweet or salty (the salty kind is also called chaas), and in fierce summer heat many people drink one instead of a meal 6. Turkey has ayran, a salted, foamy yogurt drink, and Bangladesh has borhani, fragrant with herbs 7.
Some old customs sound like dares. In parts of Bulgaria and Turkey, cooks once started yogurt by dropping live red wood ants into warm milk and burying the pot in an anthill overnight. University of Copenhagen researchers recreated the method in a study published in 2025 and found the ants' formic acid and microbes really do set the milk 5. In Turkey and elsewhere, cooks also used pinecones, chamomile, linden flowers or nettle roots as starters 5.
Yogurt even shows up in scripture. The Book of Judges describes a guest asking for water and being handed curdled milk in a noble bowl, and Genesis has Abraham offering curds and milk to angelic visitors as a sign of hospitality 2.
Place in human experience
Yogurt has always been a home food. In Bulgaria, women made it by eye and taste, and as one ethnologist puts it, two grandmothers in neighbouring villages using the same milk will still make different yogurt, because it belongs to the land, the animals and the family 1. Industry changed that. After the communist state took over dairies in 1949, microbiologists collected samples from women's rukatkas nationwide and selected one official, patented Bulgarian yogurt 1. Small dairies shrank from about 3,000 to 28 regional centres, though local makers are now coming back 1.
National pride runs deep. Bulgaria's state company still licenses its cultures to Japan and South Korea 1. In 2014 a UK court ruled that US-made Chobani could not call its strained yogurt "Greek" in Britain, after rival Fage sued 8.
And yogurt travels with people. For Rose Colombosian, a family recipe from Armenia became an American business 4.
Sources
- Madhvi Ramani, "The country that brought yoghurt to the world". BBC Travel. https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20180110-the-country-that-brought-yoghurt-to-the-world
- Ricardo Weill, Yogurt: Ancient Food in the 21st Century. Danone Institute / Asociación Civil Danone, 2017. https://www.danoneinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Book-Yogurt-Ancient-Food-2018_en.pdf
- "yogurt". Online Etymology Dictionary. https://www.etymonline.com/word/yogurt
- "Colombo Yogurt: A Massachusetts Success Story". Massachusetts Historical Society. https://www.masshist.org/object-of-the-month/objects/colombo-yogurt-a-massachusetts-success-story-2004-06-01
- Linda Geddes, "'Surprisingly creamy': as a fermentista, how could I resist making ant yoghurt?". The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/oct/03/ant-yoghurt-fementation-process-study
- Felicity Cloake, "How to make the perfect mango lassi". The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2015/may/21/how-to-make-perfect-mango-lassi-recipe
- Melissa Clark, "Yogurt Drinks, Not Too Smooth". The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/21/dining/yogurt-drinks-not-too-smooth.html
- "'Greek' yoghurt Chobani firm loses legal battle". BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-25954228
