The Fun of Making Yogurt - Part 2

Yum, yum, yummy, yum, yum! Home made yogurt. From back left to front: Blueberry, raspberry and creamy dreamy vanilla.

I have it! The perfect recipe for home made yogurt. It is thick and creamy and delicious, and worth the 20 minutes of effort to make it.

Really it is so easy. So for those that want to have a go here's what I did.

1 litre of light milk (can use any milk you like)
About 1 - 2 tablespoons of store bought plain yogurt (make sure it has active cultures - I think the brand I used was farmers pride)
1/2 cup powdered skim milk.

Mix the milk powder and milk together in a saucepan and heat gently, stirring often with a metal spoon, and bring to just about boiling point. Don't burn it, but make sure it gets hot enough, so when it just starts to rumble, but not boiling furiously.

While your doing that have some containers, plastic or glass, and wash in hot soapy water, rinse well then fill with boiling water to steralize. Also, get your store bought yogurt out so it comes to room temp.

After your milk has come to the boil, cool it down (I pop it in a sink of water with an ice brick to hurry this stage up), stirring regularly until it comes down to approx 39 - 42 degrees. (If you don't have a candy thermometer like moi, I just stick my pinky in, it has to still be warm but not burning, so if you can hold it in and count to five in comfort its good to go. (empty the boiling water out of containers and let them air dry while waiting to cool)

Mix the store bought yogurt with a little of the milk in a bowl, mix till its smooth then pour back into the saucepan and stir through.

Now here's the part you can do what you like. If you want plain yogurt, just pour it straight into a container ( I leave a little plain for the starter yogurt for next time, also it can be used as a sour cream sub, you can make cheese, salad dressing, dips, etc). If you want it flavoured, what I did was pop some yummy jam in the bottom of the container, and added about a tablespoon (more if you like it sweeter) of castor sugar to the milk and mix it in, then pour milk onto the jam in containers. For the last container I added some vanilla extract and mixed it in.

Now pop your containers (no lids) into an esky, with a couple of jugs of hot water from the tap, put the lid on and walk away. If its a cold day, or the esky was cold at the start you can refill your jugs a couple of hours in, but other wise leave the lid on and let them cook for about 8 hours. When you lift the lid you should have nice thick creamy set yogurt. Pop the lids on in stick in the fridge.

I have read it can last anywhere from 10 days to 3 weeks. We are having problems keeping it in the container for anymore than 2 days because it gets scoffed in no time, but as far as I'm concerned its coming out a lot cheaper and I can make any flavour we like, and have all different flavours in the fridge at once. You can also make as big a batch as you like, just increase your amount of starter yogurt.

And apparently you can heat your milk in the microwave, which will be my next experiment.

Enjoy!