Homemade Yogurt

Snooping around on different food blogs over the years, I came across a few people who insisted that homemade yogurt is not only the best tasting, but was easy to make. So, after reading what I could about the process, I decided to give it a try. As long as I was typing up my results, I thought I might as well share.

I settled on a recipe that started out with scalding one quart of whole milk. Using the candy thermometer, I brought the temperature of the milk to 180 degrees--following the directions exactly--but it probably isn't necessary to get it that warm. How much bad bacteria can there be in fresh, pasteurized milk? (If you know, please don't answer that hypothetical question.)

The next step was to stir in 1/3 cup of non-fat dried milk. Not everyone adds the dried milk. It boosts the protein, and I know it's weird, but I like the taste, so I went with it.

Now the mixture needs to cool off before you stir in the starter. If the milk is too hot, you'll kill your culture, and if it's too cool, nothing is going to happen. Once the milk mixture is cooled off to about 100-110 degrees, stir in a tablespoon of plain yogurt. You don't want to add too much, or the finished product could get sour. We always have Dannon's All Natural yogurt on hand. There isn't all the junk that's in most yogurts. And for this, I made sure that I used a fresh container.

At this point, I added a step of my own. I noticed that there were some solids floating around in the mixture. (Probably from when I impatiently turned the burner up to expedite the first step. Ooops.) I strained the whole works through a sieve, and you can see that was a good idea.

Now comes the fun part. I poured the mixture into two canning jars, one of which I had punched a hole in the lid to allow for the use of my thermometer.

The key at this point is to maintain the temperature of the yogurt-to-be at approximately 110 degrees for two to five hours. My first plan was to use my bread raising technique, which is to put them in the microwave over my stove with the door shut and the stove light beneath it left on. This is the perfect temperature to encourage the growth of yeast, but it turned out to be too cool for yogurt. Within a half an hour, the content of the jars had cooled to 102 degrees.

Plan B was the crock pot, and this worked great, but don't wander too far away. On low, with a semi-damp towel on the bottom as a cushion, the jars quickly came back up to temperature. By checking back periodically, I was able to maintain a fairly even temperature by turning the heat on only one more time.

From start to finish, the whole process took about five hours, but most of that time is hands-off. And now that I've done it once, I won't have to waste time working on the heat source.

Was it worth it? No question. Homemade yogurt is creamy--of course, it doesn't hurt to use whole milk--and not tart at all. It is definitely a far superior product than even the best yogurts that I've bought at the grocery store. Next time I'm going to try it with a lower fat milk, but I think I'm sold on making my own.

Breakfast this morning? Yogurt with fresh raspberries drizzled with honey. Mmmmm.