A staple, not a snack

I grew up eating yogurt made at home. It was part of everyday life — not just a sweet snack, but a fresh, versatile food served plain, with fruit, or as savory raita.

In most Indian homes, yogurt isn't a product you buy so much as something you keep going. A little from the last batch starts the next one. It sits on the counter overnight and by morning it's set. It shows up next to rice at lunch, thinned into a drink in the afternoon, and spiced into raita for dinner.

When I started shopping for yogurt in California, most of what I found was either very sweet or built to sit on a shelf for a long time. Plenty of it was good. Almost none of it tasted like the food I grew up with — whole milk, honest tang, and flavors that lean savory as easily as sweet.

Batch & Culture brings that tradition into a modern local dairy business: thoughtfully cultured yogurt, bold Indian flavors, and small batches made for the community.

So we're making it — properly, through an approved California dairy facility, with organic whole milk and cultures we chose on taste and texture rather than convenience. Small batches, documented, and kept cold from the facility to the market table.

We're starting with four: plain whole-milk yogurt, mango cardamom, a kachri raita built on the wild melon that grows in the sandy fields of southwestern Haryana, and a pudina raita made with mint pounded by hand. Plain is the one we judge ourselves by. The raitas are the ones we're most excited to hand to someone who's never had yogurt as a savory food.

Everything after that we'd like to figure out with the people who show up: which flavors come back, what sizes make sense, which markets to stand at. That's what the pilot is for.

Come taste the first batch

Join the list and we'll tell you where and when the first California farmers-market tasting happens.