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 :)

~(' ')~