All the other knit–bloggers are doing it. Urban homesteaders all over are doing it.
Considering we’ve got a teething toddler who has only 2 foods she’s guaranteed to eat at any given time (bananas and, you guessed it, yogurt), a dairy-crazy pregnant lady, and a health-conscious yogi/husband/daddy in our house, having a cheaper, reliable, and ready source of more yogurt would be a great thing for us. It really doesn’t look that hard, so I thought I’d give it a try.
Ok, so we don’t have a crock-pot. We certainly don’t have a fancy (or even thrifted) yogurt-making device. We don’t even have a cooler (a la the Urban Homestead book). But I have a stove and decent pots and bathtowels for insulation, so I figured I was good to go. I heated up 1 bag’s worth of milk (for you Americans, that’s 1/3 gallon) to the right temp (used the meat thermometer), and then let it cool down sufficiently. I mixed in about 1/3c. plain yogurt as the “starter” and wrapped the pot up in a big towel and stuck it in the pre-warmed stove. And waited.
And waited.
And checked it, 2.5 hours later, found it was very runny but smelled kind-of yogurtly, so I let it go.
And waited.
And waited.
And… you get the picture. More that 8 hours later, it still wasn’t very thick at all, by most yogurt standards — and I prefer my yogurt “Balkan style”, very thick. But it was bedtime, and I figured I could try draining some.
So yeah, not as successful as I hoped. The draining went awfully — I had to pitch that part. The rest of the batch will probably get thrown in to the blender for smoothies — it has a very mild, yogurty-like flavour, but not much body at all.
I will try this again, but next time I will use: a) organic yogurt for the starter and v) organic whole milk for the base.
Oh, and there’s no pictures, not because of the lack-of-camera (yay, it has been unearthed!) but because who wants to see photos of runny yogurt? Eww.
Aemmeleia's Ephemera 