Last week, I made my own yogurt for the first time, and met with surprising success. While it wasn’t as eventful as last year’s maraschino cherry experiment, I’m still very proud of myself. Here’s how to duplicate the process at home:
1. Get your hands on some yogurt culture. Oh, wait, that’s expensive, which defeats the whole purpose of trying to save some money by making something from scratch. Just get some plain yogurt with live cultures.
2. Doesn’t anybody make plain live-culture yogurt anymore? There’s dead yogurt, there’s flavored yogurt, and there’s plain sugar-free yogurt, which actually has aspartame in it, which is bad for you, and also gives me headaches. Settle on some Dannon vanilla flavored.
3. While you’re at the store, buy a quart of cheap milk. This is an experiment, after all, and you have no idea whether the result will be edible. If it works, you can buy the fancy-pants organic milk next time.
4. Measure three and a half cups of milk into a saucepan. Wonder why you can’t just use the whole quart. Decide to follow the directions this time, since you’re experimenting with bacteria and you wouldn’t want something to go wrong.
5. Add half a cup of dry milk powder so your yogurt will be thick and spoonable like the store bought kind. Unless you’re making yogurt smoothies and you want it thin.
6. Boil the milk. DO NOT turn your back on it, because milk goes from not boiling to boiling over very suddenly.
7. Remove boiled milk from heat. Clean up the mess from the milk that boiled over. Allow the milk to cool to 115 degrees.
8. Realize that it takes an awfully long time for milk to cool down on an eighty-degree day. Pour it in a jar and leave a meat thermometer in it while you watch a few episodes of Firefly, or whatever.
9. Add a couple heaping tablespoons of live-culture yogurt to the 115-degree milk and shake well.
10. Incubate the yogurt at 115 degrees for 6-8 hours. You can do this in a variety of ways, but I used one of my husband’s lunch boxes, because everybody knows how much microbes like to grow in lunch boxes.
11. Open the jar and check on it. What looked like milk this morning should now be all thick and yogurty. Hooray!
12. Who eats plain yogurt, anyway? Mash up some berries and mix them in. Yummy.
13. Oh. wait, not so yummy. Add just a little sugar. That’s better. Enjoy!
Author: Jack Black @ Articlet
1. Get your hands on some yogurt culture. Oh, wait, that’s expensive, which defeats the whole purpose of trying to save some money by making something from scratch. Just get some plain yogurt with live cultures.
2. Doesn’t anybody make plain live-culture yogurt anymore? There’s dead yogurt, there’s flavored yogurt, and there’s plain sugar-free yogurt, which actually has aspartame in it, which is bad for you, and also gives me headaches. Settle on some Dannon vanilla flavored.
3. While you’re at the store, buy a quart of cheap milk. This is an experiment, after all, and you have no idea whether the result will be edible. If it works, you can buy the fancy-pants organic milk next time.
4. Measure three and a half cups of milk into a saucepan. Wonder why you can’t just use the whole quart. Decide to follow the directions this time, since you’re experimenting with bacteria and you wouldn’t want something to go wrong.
5. Add half a cup of dry milk powder so your yogurt will be thick and spoonable like the store bought kind. Unless you’re making yogurt smoothies and you want it thin.
6. Boil the milk. DO NOT turn your back on it, because milk goes from not boiling to boiling over very suddenly.
7. Remove boiled milk from heat. Clean up the mess from the milk that boiled over. Allow the milk to cool to 115 degrees.
8. Realize that it takes an awfully long time for milk to cool down on an eighty-degree day. Pour it in a jar and leave a meat thermometer in it while you watch a few episodes of Firefly, or whatever.
9. Add a couple heaping tablespoons of live-culture yogurt to the 115-degree milk and shake well.
10. Incubate the yogurt at 115 degrees for 6-8 hours. You can do this in a variety of ways, but I used one of my husband’s lunch boxes, because everybody knows how much microbes like to grow in lunch boxes.
11. Open the jar and check on it. What looked like milk this morning should now be all thick and yogurty. Hooray!
12. Who eats plain yogurt, anyway? Mash up some berries and mix them in. Yummy.
13. Oh. wait, not so yummy. Add just a little sugar. That’s better. Enjoy!
Author: Jack Black @ Articlet
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