Yogurt!

OMIGOD!
I made yogurt!  I feel like I did the first time I baked bread. These things are more chemistry (or, acutally, more alchemy) than cooking.

After last week's abysmal failure at making yogurt, I decided to buck up, buy good ingredients, follow directions slavishly, and do it right all-around... I also decided to follow a slightly different recipe / method.  You, too can follow it, here.

So, on to the good stuff.... milk.
Now, I'm not a big fan of milk. I love my cheese, don't get me wrong, but I just don't groove on milk. We get our milk delivered from the nice people at Smith Brothers, who do us right. But the problem is that we get organic milk delivered, and I've come to understand that organic milk is, almost always, ultra-pasteurized - - which means that it won't grow our little yogurt beasties.

So, to the fancy-dancy grocery store we go, to buy fancy-dancy milk. Pretty milk.  Whole milk.

Say what you want to about milk, but it's really hard to resist when it comes packaged so beautifully.  Not only that... it wasn't homogenized, so it had really pretty cream floating to the surface. Taste it... taste it!

Yum.

Into the crock pot it went. On Hi for an hour and a half. Then, I set it out to cool until it reached a temp of 110F (about two hours with the crock outside the electrical business).  It got a yellow buttery skimmy top.

After it cooled down, I set my oven to preheat to 170F, the lowest temp it will go to.

While my oven was preheating, I took a half cup of yogurt with live active cultures and put it in a bowl. I added some of the warm milk...

...and mixed it together to temper the yogurt - - to get the little beasties happy with the warm bath they were about to take.  Then, the whole business got mixed into the warm milk, and I put the crock pot crock into the oven. Turned off the oven. Turned on the light.

And walked away.

Seriously - we went for a walk at the track.  Well, Bella went for a run. She tried to challenge the track team kids, but they smoked her.

About six hours later...

YOGURT!  And, oh, is it good yogurt. Now, part of that is because of the whole milk. But part of it is that stuff-is-really-really-good-when-you-make-it-at-home thing... it's like the difference between homemade chocolate chip cookies and Chips Ahoy.

Breakfast...

mmmmmmmmmm.

I have to say: It was so easy to make, and so rewarding, that this is definitely going to be something we do all the time now.  Fresh fruit season is right around the corner, and we're trying to kybosh sugar as much as we can, so it's all just perfect.

You really should try this. It requires very very little hands-on time, and produces great results.