Home Made Yogurt

Home Made Yogurt

By Winnie

The other day a few of my neighbor friends and I got together and shared some of our home made items. I shared my liquid and dry laundry detergent recipes, someone shared how to make window cleaner, but the most popular item of the evening was the home made yogurt. It was delicious and it was fairly simple to make. At About.com there is an informative article on the different methods on how to make home made yogurt that I think anyone could do.

The trickiest part of making yogurt is maintaining a constant temperature while the yogurt is fermenting. There are yogurt machines you can purchase but if you don't want to get all fancy like that, and oven a thermos or even the sun will do. My friend makes her yogurt in the oven.

The ingredients that you will need are:
1 gallon milk (she found that the whole milk set up thicker than the milk that had less fat.)
1/2- 1 c non fat dry milk
1/2 c sugar
1 t vanilla
1/2 c plain yogurt with live and active cultures (there are also packets of yogurt cultures you can buy at health food stores, they both work equally as well) This only needs to be used the first time you make yogurt. After that , you can use some of the yogurt from the previous batch.

Heat the milk on the stove until it reaches the desired temperature of 180 degrees. Mix in the sugar and other flavorings and let the milk cool to 110 to 120 degrees.

Preheat the oven to 175 degrees and then turn off the oven.

Fill quart-sized mason jars with the milk/yogurt mixture and place them in the warm oven. Cover the jars with a towel and turn on the oven light (this helps to maintain the proper temperature). Let it sit for 8-10 hours. After the proper amount of time, you can strain the yogurt with a cheesecloth if it isn't as thick as you would like it to be.

There you have it, yogurt! I can attest to the fact that the home made variety tastes much better than the store bought kind. Plus you know that there aren't any added ingredients in there that you might not want. Plus, it is much more inexpensive than store bought. Why not make some yogurt today?

Have you made your own yogurt? What works best for you? Share your ideas and expertise with us!

For the other methods to make yogurt, click here: http://homecooking.about.com/od/dairyrecipes/r/bldairy9.htm

For the recipe to make laundry detergent, click here: http://www.directive21.com/blog/2013/10/diy-laundry-detergent/