Yogurt take 2

So everyone seems to have loved the yogurt I made :) I personally loved it with fruit so this afternoon I decided to make some more. The one concern that my mom mentioned was that I was using milk with 3.8% fat so I wanted to see how it would work with less fatty milk. But I still have 1 leter of the heavy milk so rather than just dump it and try with skim milk I decided to mix the fatty milk with the 1% milk that I have for cereal. I also decided to make a double batch since my parents loved it and so did Talia.

Heating the milk. I was tired of losing the thermometer into the milk to I clipped it to the side of the pot.

Cooling the milk down in the sink because the pot was so large

Yogurt and Sour Dough bread

I love strawberry yogurt and so last night when Talia and I went shopping I made sure to get some strawberries. For breakfast I decided to go and try and favour the yogurt I made the other day.I started by getting some strawberries and slicing them up into small prices. I then tossed them into a small pot with a couple tablespoons of water and a tablespoon of sugar and started them stewing.

Once the fruit was nicely bubbling I took it off the heat and mixed it into the yogurt. I tasted it and it was still a little sour so I added 2 more teaspoons of sugar and mixed it all together. Talia loved it for breakfast. The one thing that I noticed was it turned a little too liquidy after I added the fruit. The extra water I added to stew the fruit caused it so next time I will see about making the fruit without as much water.

Bread: The other day I started making a sour dough starter. It was really simply, take flour, add water, and wait a couple of days. Every couple hours give it a stir. This kind of went crazy. In less than 2 days the batter had turned into a giant bubbly mass. I actually had to divide it into 2 containers and put it in the fridge to try and slow down the growth. So this morning after making the yogurt I decided to make the bread. The one thing I forgot was that the fridge would have stopped the yeast in the batter from continuing to grow. I ended up guessing as to how much salt and extra flour to add but it turned out very nice. I left it to rise for 3 hours because it was so cold and that was my big mistake. The yeast just didnt rise that much, I should have left it out for a couple hours to come to room temperature. But even then after 3 hours I rolled it out and put it into a pan and it turned out quite nice.

The flavour is very subtle and its really soft.

Planters in winter

While I am here and on a blogging roll I figured I would also type up what is happening in my garden. I have a new planter thanks to my fabulous father. I had this idea a couple weeks ago to provide more light to my plants without taking much more space and a couple of weeks ago I talked to my dad to hear his thoughts on how to go about building it but I never managed to find the time to try and build it. Thankfully my dad took it upon himself to go and test it out and build a prototype my planter light stand.

Rewind: So winter is always depressing for plants. I have to bring them all inside in order to keep plants growing and with the way our apartment is its almost impossible to get enough light. The only place where a decent amount of light gets in is in the bedroom and even with that I have had a lot of issues with growing things. So the other day I was trying to figure out how to set up some extra plant lights. The idea was simply, build a box (that can hold the planter pots) with 2 poles running up opposite sides. Attached to the poles would be a florescent light. Piece of cake...

What my dad created was FABOULOUS!!!! it was a nice box on the bottom the poles and a box on the top that contains 2 light bulbs.

The upper box contains the lights and provides the perfect place to hold extra smaller plants that don't need as much light.

The full dresser :)

Now you may be wondering about why I put the planter pots sideways in the light box. The simply answer is that the lower box  is too large for my pots and I wasn't going to be able to fit all the plants on the dresser even with the added space on the lights. That being said, Talia came up with a brilliant idea that will look amazing and allow for the perfect fit. Ikea glass décor pots!

We are planning to put 10 of these under the lights. The fit perfectly with a small amount of space around the pots. The glass will look amazing and the depth will be really nice for starting plants in. The best part, we have a coupon for ikea so we can go and pick them up in january. I can't wait until My dad and I can make more of them so that I can start growing all my herbs and even start planting for the spring early :)

~(' ')~

Home Made Yogurt

So for xmas Talia game me a book titles "Wild Ferments" by Sandor Kats. It's a book all about making fermented things like kimchi, tempeh, cheese, yogurt, and yes even booze... So with some time on my hands I decided to go and make some yogurt this morning. Thankfully my mother had the yogurt culture bucket thing for many years. It has never been used so when we were over at my parents 2 days ago I asked if I could borrow it. If all goes well then I will start making yogurt on a regular basis :)

The process of making yogurt is really simple.

Step 1: Take whole milk and heat it up to ~180F
Step 2: Cool the milk to 110F
Step 3: Mix in 1 tbsp of live yogurt
Step 4: Put the milk mixture in the yogurt bucket (basically Styrofoam therrmose to help keep the temperature at 110F) and leave it for 8-10 hours


So this is exactly what I did :)
I used the cheese thermometer that came with my cheese making kit to measure the temperatures and it took probably close to 45 minutes to get the temperature up high enough. This was mainly due to the fact that I was using a really low settings on the stove to gently bring it up. I probably could have used a higher setting but the higher the setting the more likely you are to burn the milk and that's just a pain to clean. I wasnt taking pictures this early in the process but I assume you can imagine what it looks like to bring milk to an almost boil in a pot.

After I brought the milk up to temperature I had to cool it down quite a bit. I started by simply pouring the milk from the pot to a measuring cup and back hoping that it would work the same way as cooling tea and it did some what. The temp dropped quite drastically the first couple of switches going from 180F down to about 150F but after that it was really slow so I decided to follow the books directions and just put the milk into a container of cool water. I added some ice cubes to help it along and in about 10 minutes it came down to about 120F.

My milk in a reverse double boiler/cooler. The large white container on the left is the yogurt thermos

Down to 120F :) The bubbles were the result of trying to cool the milk by pouring it between the measuring cup and the pot

I had already preheated the thermos using hot tap water (our tap water is very hot) which will help the milk stay warm because it wont lose heat to the thermos. I was still a little concerned with the thermos stealing some of the heat so I decided to switch the milk into the thermos when it was at 120F instead of 110F.

At this point I simply waited until it was about 115F and then I added the live yogurt. The yogurt was in the fridge so it was cold which is why I added it when it was still a little too warm. The starter yogurt I used was a Iogo probiotic strawberry yogurt mostly because it looked tasty. I am a little concerned because after I got the yogurt I read the instructions and it says to use plain yogurt.... Hopefully the extra sugar and fruit wont effect the culture. The other thing that I am concerned about was that I read somewhere that the container should read "Contains live culture" or something like that and none of the yogurts I saw in the store said anything like that. Hopefully the "probiotic" label means that its still alive and its not just some marketing term.

After I mixed in the starter yogurt (1Tbsp) I put the lid on the container and put it in a nice warm space to rest. I chose to put it on the heater because that should help keep the temperature up to allow the bacteria to eat the lactose :)

Now I just have to wait :)

~(' ')~

xmas cookies

So we had xmas a little early this year all around so I already have my xmas gifts from my parents.

My Mom gave me the most adorable sugar cookie box so today I decided to make them. The box even came with a little snowman cookie cutter :)