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Posted to rec.food.cooking
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How to make yogurt without any equipment
"Kajikit" > wrote in message
...
> (I mentioned that I was making my own yogurt and a friend asked how,
> so I wrote it up...)
>
> When I was a kid my father used to have a yogurt maker and he'd make a
> couple of jars of the stuff every week... I didn't really like it then
> because we were at war with mama - she wanted us to eat it au natural,
> and we wanted to add a bunch of sugar... lol I've never enjoyed the
> very sour taste of plain natural yogurt.But fortunately when you make
> your own, you have the power to make it as sweet or sour as you like.
>
> It's incredibly simple. All you need is a saucepan and a warm place to
> put it. Your oven works wonderfully as an incubator... a thermometer
> is an optional extra, as are jar/s to set the yogurt in. I've got a
> bunch of glass peanut butter jars that I've saved for preserving, and
> the big ones are the perfect size for yogurt.
>
> You can use ANY milk and yogurt to make your own. Some people add milk
> powder to their milk to make it even creamier and richer... this is
> entirely optional, but the more milk fat and milk-solids in the milk,
> the thicker and creamier the yogurt will come out. The only criteria
> is that it has to be DAIRY - soy 'milk' or nut/rice 'milk' will just
> make a mess unless you use a special process... the yogurt-making
> beasties need dairy of some kind to work on. Yogurt is very low in
> lactose because the yogurt-making beasties eat it up, but if you need
> 100% lactose-free yogurt you can use lactaid milk or one of those
> milks that has extra stuff added to it to make it seem creamier and
> richer than it actually is. My personal choice is to use plain
> unadulterated 1% milk because that way I'm not getting any additives
> in my yogurt and I don't mind it's being relatively thin - I put it on
> my cereal in the morning. It also does not particularly matter what
> brand of yogurt you use for your starter. Store-brand works just as
> well as super-high-priced organic stuff. Once you have a successful
> batch of yogurt made you can use your own yogurt to start the next one
> and so on.
>
> Now you have your ingredients, on to the yogurt-making.
>
> Step One. Pick a time when you won't be needing to use the oven for
> 10-12 hours. The evening after dinner is great because then your
> yogurt will be ready for breakfast. It's even better if you've used
> the oven that day/evening, because it will still be a bit warm and
> make a better setting environment - or you can turn the oven onto its
> lowest setting while you heat the milk. Just don't forget to turn it
> OFF again - yogurt needs to set at roughly 90 degrees, and if it gets
> too hot it'll kill off the yogurt-making critters.
>
> Pour your milk into your saucepan and bring it to the boil, stirring
> it fairly often so that it doesn't stick to the bottom of the pan or
> burn. A lot of recipes will say 'stir constantly' but that's really
> not necessary. Use a medium heat and you only have to stir it every
> four or five minutes. Just don't go away and forget it entirely!
>
> Once the saucepan starts to boil and bubble up,THEN start stirring
> nonstop. Boil it for 2-5 minutes or until it's in danger of boiling
> over in the pan. Timing is NOT critical... Then take the pan off the
> heat and let it cool down. You can either let it cool down by itself
> on the stovetop (set the oven timer for 5-10 minutes so that you come
> back to check the temperature fairly often). Or else you can set the
> pot into a sink of cold water to speed up the cooling process. My two
> quarts of milk took 30 minutes to cool down enough by itself, but less
> than 10 in a sinkful of water. The milk is the right temperature to
> continue when it is 110 degrees, or when you can comfortably stick a
> finger in and say 'this is warm'.
>
> You don't technically HAVE to boil the milk - it only needs to be warm
> enough to make the yogurt-making critters happy... but the boiling
> changes the nature of the milk proteins and makes for a thicker,
> smoother yogurt. Since I'm using low-fat milk I want all the extra
> thickening I can get.
>
> When the milk is comfortably warm, stir in your starter yogurt - a
> tablespoon or so of plain yogurt per quart of milk. Whisk it in well
> so that the yogurt-making beasties are well-distributed through the
> warm milk. From here you have two options. You need to set the yogurt
> in some kind of container. You can even use the saucepan that the milk
> was cooked in, but that'll tie up the saucepan for the duration (or
> make for strange-looking yogurt if you spoon it out once it's set and
> put it into a different container for storage). You can use any
> relatively heat-proof bowl or container with a lid. I'm using recycled
> jars because they don't cost any money and I have them handy.
>
> Put your yogurt into the warm (NOT HOT!) oven, close the door and turn
> on the oven light. Then leave it alone for 10-12 hours. When you come
> back, you should have some nicely set yogurt with a bit of whey
> floating on top. The whey is entirely natural. Just drain it off and
> enjoy the yogurt! If you don't want to use the oven, you can use a
> foam cooler with a heating pad and some towels... or you can wrap the
> pot in towels and take your chances at room temperature. They made
> yogurt in the middle east for millennia before the electric oven was
> even dreamed of. But most of us have a working oven, and that's really
> the simplest way.
http://biology.clc.uc.edu/fankhauser...YOGURT2000.htm
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