Curious Cook in the New York Times: Making yogurt and crème fraîche

In this month's column I write about cultured dairy products and how to make them at home. I've also put together a recipe for a hybrid between two Indian desserts, easy shrikhand (sweetened drained yogurt) and tricky mishti doi (milk cooked down by about half, then fermented into yogurt). It sweetens a drained yogurt with its own whey, cooked down with sugar to make a tart caramel.

For two dozen unusual recipes from the yogurt belt (Eastern Europe to India), including "proto-pasta" made from yogurt and wheat, see Anne Mendelson's recent and fine book Milk (Knopf, 2008).