Our skyr-style yoghurts are made right here on the farm. They’re thick, satisfying, packed with protein and completely natural. We don’t add anything “extra” to our yoghurts. No milk powder, no thickeners, no stabilisers, nothing like that. Just live cultures and our own skimmed cows milk, straight from the day’s milking.
Yoghurt
"I love the fresh, clean flavours of the yoghurt and the local honey is such a treat"
- Macknade / Fen Farm Dairy Customer -
Our Suffolk take on an Icelandic staple
Steve and Jonny travelled to the geothermal farmlands of Iceland to be trained in the art of traditional skyr yoghurt making by master skyr maker, Thorgrimur.
This is our own interpretation of an iconic staple of the Icelandic diet, handmade here on our Suffolk farm, from the fresh morning milk of our free-ranging Montbeliarde herd. Making it the traditional way is a lot more labour intensive. To achieve that beautifully silky texture and creamy consistency, we gently strain our skyr through natural cheesecloths. This creates a completely natural finish and preserves the delicate milky flavours.
These are our 3 secrets:
Shhh... don't tell anyone. There's a reason our products are some of the finest in the world and it has nothing to do with fancy tech or good marketing. It's simply that everything we do is right here on our farm. We have control over every step, from soil to finished product. Every process feeds the next. We call this circular farming.
Control
We grow our own forage and grazing right here in the surrounding landscape. We care for every cow in our herd as an individual and we care for our precious milk from the moment it leaves the cow. What we take from the land we then put back again. We call this circular farming.
Proximity
Within minutes of the morning milking, our fresh milk is already in the making rooms just a few metres away. Within hours it is being made into cheese and butter. Our milk doesn’t spend time being transported meaning our produce retains all the incredible characteristics of our fresh milk.
Gentleness
Our unique set up allows our milk to be gently gravity fed from the milking parlour into the making rooms next door. We choose to make our produce by hand, avoiding the use of big industrial dairy equipment. No piece of machinery can imitate the gentleness of a true artisan, who really cares.
Our Yoghurt Flavours
Like all our products, we’ve taken every care when sourcing any ingredients that we can’t create ourselves on the farm and we’re proud to shine a spotlight on the small batch artisan producers who contribute to making our yoghurt so delicious.
Wildflower Honey
The honey for our Wildflower Honey yoghurt comes from the hives of local Suffolk beekeeper David Martin. Here’s a picture of David in his native habitat. He also happens to be a member of our production team here at the farm and keeps some of his hives on our farmland.
David’s bees forage our surrounding Suffolk hedgerows and wild areas. They are never fed sugar syrup during the honey production season so you can be sure you’re eating true pollen-derived honey, made with minimal food miles. Although, as David likes to point out, the bees themselves do clock up a lot of “air” miles during their busy season!
Strawberry and Blackcurrant
Both the Strawberry and Blackcurrant conserves for our yoghurt come from the fabulous England Preserves. Sky and Kai source their fruit from small mixed farms, supporting environmentally sustainable agriculture practices. Their jams are made in their London jammery (is that a word? It is now.)
England Preserves jams contain a whopping 60% fruit, that’s twice the fruit content of your average supermarket jam, which means half the amount of sugar. Who needs so much sugar anyway when the fruit is so vibrant?
Making Fen Farm Yoghurt
Step-by-careful-step
1
The skyr making process begins in the same way as buttermaking, when we separate the cream from the milk to achieve the skimmed (fat-free) milk necessary for making a traditional Icelandic-style skyr. The skimmed milk is then gravity-fed into a large stainless steel vat, where we heat it to a high temperature. This heating process helps to create a silky consistency in the finished yoghurt.
2
We bring the temperature back down again to allow us to add our carefully selected strains of lactic cultures to the milk. These live bacteria instantly get to work acidifying the milk. By the following morning, the milk in the vat has set and now resembles an enormous self-set yoghurt. At this point, we stir the yoghurt until it becomes a fine mush.
3
True to the traditional Icelandic method, we pour the yoghurt into straining tables with muslin cloth laid inside.
4
We stir the contents of the muslin cloth for several hours by hand as the yoghurt thickens.
5
After a time, the skyr yoghurt becomes thick with a silky texture.
6
When it’s ready to eat, we pour the finished yoghurt into our yoghurt dispenser, ready to fill the yoghurt pots.
7
For our layered skyrs, we add delicious fruit conserves from England Preserves to the pot first.
8
The pots are then filled carefully, to keep the preserves and the yoghurt from mixing in the pot.
9
Finally, the lids go on and our finished skyr yoghurts are ready for the chiller.