Yogurt

During our Locavore Challenge this fall, we bought dairy products from a small farm outside of town. The yogurt came in big ball jars and in addition to being delicious, produced no extra trash at the end-- no plastic film cover to throw away, and no plastic tub to recycle. We re-use the yogurt containers for any number of things around the house, but go through at least one 32 ounce container a week and have piles of them in our cupboard. So I resolved to try to make yogurt, mostly to eliminate the packaging from our lives.

My first attempt was a time-consuming failure and the yogurt didn't set right or taste very good. So we fed it to Stella Dog. Who loved it.

Four months later I was ready to try again. Armed with a new recipe (from the Whole Foods for the Whole Family cookbook), and a new plan for keeping the yogurt at the right temperature I set out with low expectations.

First, you put 4C of milk in a pan and the recipe says to "scald them milk", unsure of what that meant I just heated it until it was near boiling. Once it cools back down to 95-115F, you add 1C of dry milk, which they didn't specify needed to be whisked in to dissolve, but I discovered quickly, and then add 2-4 tablespoons of yogurt with live active cultures. We had a giant tub of Nancy's Organic in the fridge so I used that. I was generous in the amount of yogurt I added.

Once everything is mixed together you put it in jars and then for the hard part... Keeping it between 95-115 degrees for 3-9 hours, or until it sets. Last time I tried preheating the oven and then turning it off. Even on the lowest setting it was too hot (and probably killed my yogurt cultures resulting in the failure to set). Other ways of maintaining the temperature including electric heating pads, using your food dehydrator, or setting the yogurt in a thermos wrapped in a towel. My food dehydrator is the type with trays, so that wasn't an option for me. So I settled on yet another option-- using a cooler and a hot water bottle to heat it up. The cooler maintains the temperature and once I played with the number of heat sources a bit I got it right and was able to leave the yogurt to setting without constantly checking the temperature. I used a digital thermometer to monitor the temperature and with one hot water bottle and one glass jar filled with boiling water and a few minutes for them to cool a bit, the temperature maintained at 111 degrees for long enough that I left for a few hours.

Six hours later we came back and the temperature was 89 and the yogurt was set! Success!