Good Eats

Sort of. This isn't really a good eats, but a make your own yogurt :-). My Aunt and Uncle are two of the best cooks/bakers I've ever been around. Joel and I took a trip to visit them in Maryland a few years ago, and it was like staying at a resort with the best food! They got us onto making your own yogurt. Joel and I eat a lot of yogurt. We use it in place of sour cream and for the most part if something calls for mayo, we use at least half yogurt instead of mayo if not more.

Anyways, making your own yogurt is time consuming but we think worth it. You start with a big pot with milk in it (however much you want to make). Bring it slowly up to 180', this takes a while since milk easily scalds, you need to heat it on low. For me, this took one hour.

Once it reaches 180', turn off the heat and cool it to 120'. You can put it on ice to speed it up, but I prefer just to take if off the burner and keep checking it. At this point you'll want to lay out some towels in preparation for the next step.

Once it gets to 120, take about 2-3 spoonfuls nonfat, plain yogurt and drop it in the milk. Cover the pot, and wrap it up in blankets so it cools slowly.

Leave it for 6 hours. After 6 hours, take the pot out of the blankets and put it in the fridge. I leave it overnight. Now you have yogurt, but it is pretty thin!

Next you strain it. I used coffee filters in a strainer and put if over a bowl. my Aunt and Uncle use cheese cloth. Let me rephrase, I used cheese cloth at first, but didn't use enough layers and pretty much just ran the yogurt through the cheese cloth, so I switched to coffee filters since I ran out of cheese cloth. **As usual I forgot to take a picture of the coffee filters, so here is an example of too little cheese cloth, with some pretty flowers in the background (thanks LP!!)

Straining it takes a while, just leave it in the fridge and the whey will separate and drain into the bowl. You strain it until you get to the consistency you want, you can keep going until it gets to greek yogurt consistency and voila! We haven't added fruit or flavorings yet because we mainly use it for dinner, dressing, dips, etc.

We really enjoy this, hope you do to'!