I’ve got a quick one here from Larry, the Keep It Simple Engineer. He’s the same guy who did the sourdough bread recipe. Today he shows how easy it is to make your own yogurt. Take it away, Larry.
Hi Drew and all…
Yogurt is a breakfast staple for me, and I buy quality yogurt in 64 oz (half-gallon) containers. The price recently has risen to over $6, and the store doesn’t always have what I prefer in stock. It is not lost on me that whole milk runs around $3 a gallon.
So I took the leap and bought a automatic yogurt maker even though I thought it over priced. The first results were impressive. Looks like I’m going to be saving around $15-20 a month, and get great yogurt.
Here’s what I did. Poured half-gallon of whole milk into a large glass bowl and heated in my microwave (which has a temperature probe) to 185F – 23 minutes, Then I placed the glass bowl in a larger bowl, ran tap water in the larger bowl and stirred gently until the temperature dropped to 110F. Then I added about half a cup of my store bought yogurt and mixed it thoroughly, poured it into the yogurt makers container. Placing it in the yogurt machine’s water bath for 4 hours, the into the refrigerator overnight. The next morning I had excellent yogurt! Expectations exceeded!
I had originally thought to add instant dry milk powder to make a richer yogurt, but the store only had outdated powder. If you use store-bought yogurt as a starter, make sure it contains “live” cultures. Another plus, the tartness of the yogurt depends on the time spent in the yogurt machine. The yogurt machine maker also sells starters, but I found them unnecessary (and expensive). I think I might try making kefir, too.
So if you use yogurt regularly, you might consider this.
Larry, the KeepItSimpleEngineer
