After stalling way too long we finally did it! We made our own yogurt and it was surprisingly easy.

Yogurt
Combine 4 cups milk (we used whole milk and to our delight discovered the cheap Springvale milk at Kroger is hormone free) with 1/2 cup powdered milk (helps thicken it.) Heat to 180 degrees for 1 minute, pull off stove and cool to 115 degrees. Add anywhere between 2T plain yogurt (need “live yeast cultures”) up to 1/2 cup yogurt (we just threw in what we had left, maybe 1/3 cup?) and stir well. Pour into mason jars and cover lids with foil, stab thermometer into one of the jars. You want to keep the yogurt around 110 degrees (I think range is 105 to 110?) for 4 to 6 hours. Longer makes for more acidic yogurt so we did only 4 hours. Then stick jars in fridge and leave overnight (I think they said 12 hours?)

You can add sweeteners or vanilla or whatever when you add yogurt to milk (live culture, most recipes describe it as) but we wanted to use some of this for tzatziki sauce so we left it plain. I just gave it to Bennett with a squirt of honey and a tiny spoon of the orange peach mango spread and he gobbled it up! HOORAY! Cheap, easy, steroid free yogurt! With no high fructose corn syrup or crazy artificial colors!

You do need a thermometer, we used our digital meat probe one that we use for everything from meat to oil for deep frying to candy making. And now yogurt making!

It was intimidating for me at first and I felt like we were conducting some elaborate science experiment but it was NOT hard. Just be sure you are home for 4 to 6 hours. OH, and how did we keep the temp stable? We put the mason jars in a small cooler filled with hot water and just added more hot water as needed. It stayed really stable, I think we needed to add water twice over the 4 hours? And we just added some boiled water from the kettle to get it back up. I’ve also heard you can use a cardboard box, heating pad, towel, then set jars in there. If you google it you’ll find a ton of ideas, the cooler seemed easiest.

Also, this will mean we need to sometimes buy more plain yogurt as our live culture/starter but even an 8 oz yogurt would last a month and give us enough for a couple batches. Let me know if you try it and how it turns out!

Update: YUMMY yogurt! It’s very thick but once we stir in the sweetener it thins a lot. I think next time we’ll add the sweetener and some vanilla to it when we mix in the live culture and then let it set so it’s more custardy and already sweet. I like it that way. The babies like it with honey and a bit of fruit in it. I’ll use it for the gyros sauce this weekend and let you know how it turns out.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 18th, 2008 at 10:03 am and is filed under Food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.