Homemade Yogurt

So earlier this week the boy and I decided it would be fun to make yogurt. A while back I purchased a yogurt maker and it's been sitting here mocking me. Every time I walk into my office and see it on the shelf it yells at me and laughs. Why, you ask? I love gadgets. I have sooo many gadgets in this little sixteen hundred square foot house. Gadgets for the kitchen and my crafting - there really isn't enough room for them. What I need is a couple hundred extra square feet and a few hundred thousand dollars to make the types of rooms I need in order to actually use all of my gadgets properly. Oh and I need the time to play with them.

Back to the yogurt maker. I was at Tuesday Morning looking for a birthday gift for my MIL and saw the Waring Pro Yogurt Maker sitting on their shelves. I have been wanting a yogurt maker for quite some time and have just not made the purchase. So naturally since I was already in a buying mood I purchased 2. After all my MIL shouldn't be the only one who benefits from this gift.

The gift was wrapped and given and she even used it a while back. & still my yogurt maker mocked me. I didn't ignore it completely I did open the box and check everything out. Read the manual and recipe book and have to say I wasn't too impressed with the recipes. They just didn't make sense to me about having all those ingredients for yogurt. So I decided I needed to research further.

More mocking from the yogurt maker in the other room. This time its voice is getting louder. Oy. I decided it's time for some internet research. Recipe searching begins. I even check out youtube to see if anyone has posted about this subject and YES they have. To be honest I wasn't interested in regular yogurt, I was more interested in Greek Yogurt which is a lot thicker than standard yogurt. We tend to like that more in this house. All of my searches proved successful. I found a few recipes that weren’t too involved and looked decent enough. Watched a couple videos on how others made their yogurt. One guy did it all on his stove and was very careful. You see successful yogurt making as mostly about temperature. I don't have the patience it takes in order to watch a stove for several hours in hoping my milk doesn't scald and ruin the batch. Which solidifies the thought that purchasing this particular gadget was a smart purchase for me. So I decided it's time to get started.

Out comes my Waring Pro Yogurt Maker. Everything is cleaned and dried. Ingredients come out. The recipe I chose was a very straight forward recipe. Milk and Yogurt. You apparently need a yogurt starter in order to make yogurt. Kinda like good sourdough bread, it always needs a starter. Pan hits the stove and milk goes on to heat but no higher than 185 degrees. Then a quick cool to 110 degrees. In a separate bowl I mixed a small portion of the store-bought plain yogurt with some milk and add that to my cooled mixture. Mix together and pour into my little yogurt jars that came with my yogurt maker.

Now we reach the hard part. These steps are really easy since like I said I am a gadget person and I got to use my digital candy thermometer to warn me of liquid temperatures and such. My son Hayden was with me every step of the way. Aside from the stove cooking this is a really good kitchen project for you and your 5 year old. He enjoyed pouring in the milk and mixing the starter base. As he helped me load up the jars into the maker I explained to him that now comes the hardest part....the waiting. If you do this on the stove you can make yogurt in about 4 hours but if you're like me and don't have to patience to do that nor the patience to entertain a 5 year old while babysitting a stove then you will appreciate this next step. We cover the machine and set the timer for 10 hours.

Poor Hayden, he really did wonderfully in this process. Every now and then he would drag out his step stool to see just how far the process was going. To be honest it took a few hours for me to even notice anything. Most of the changes are visible at the tail end of the process. He would return to see the numbers change on the digital reader. Another feature made specifically for a 5 year old. The digital reader is not like what is on our ovens or microwaves when using a timer with hours and minutes. This digital reader just indicated how many whole hours remain and in the last hour it counts the whole minutes. Every now and then I would hear a little voice in the kitchen declare "4 hours more."

Finally 10 hours arrive and the buzzer buzzes. At this point we could cover and refrigerate the jars and call it done. We however prefer Greek Yogurt so there is more work to do. Out comes the step stool yet again and the boy helps empty the jars into a kitchen towel lined strainer that is placed in a bowl. We tie up the towel and place the whole in the refrigerator for the morning. Now off to bed.

In the morning the boy is up before I am and I waken to the familiar scene of a mom being gently awakened by her son without him speaking a word. I am talking about the silent stare at mommy until she wakes up - but one must do this at about a foot from her face so she can feel the breathing....you been woke up that way? Nothing like starting the heart with a good 'ol fashioned scare before coffee hits the veins. I'm up now.

He is so excited now because he gets to eat his long awaited yogurt. We open the refrigerator and everything is done the way it should be done. The whey drips from the yogurt collecting in the bowl beneith and we now have a nice thick yogurt that is now called Greek Yogurt. I see it is a little too thick, really it's the consistency of cream cheese so I add some of the whey back in, mix, stir, and load of the kids bowls.

Now I must let you know that the yogurt is as plain as plain can be. It's up to us to add our ingredients to suit our tastes. The first day we opted for just plain 'ol honey. and I enjoyed it but the kids thought....eh. This morning I mixed it up kid style. Got granola crunchies out of the pantry, added a sprinkle of brown sugar, a drop of vanilla and for my son a spoonful of berry jam his grandma made for him. Let the kids mix and eat and I have to say if they could have licked their bowls they would have.

Yogurt making takes time but we really enjoyed the exercise and the kids want to make some more. All I have to do now is save a little bit of the plain yogurt from this batch for our next batch and keep it going. Considering how much yogurt this family eats on the norm I can just imagine how much money we will be saving in the long run. This was a most excellent purchase for our family. Granted if you had more patience than I then you could do this all on your stove with your canning equipment but I am glad I did it this way just because of the anticipation factor for my son. Now if you have a yogurt recipe you would like to share with me I’d be happy to try it. Please post away!

Until Next Time, SoCal Marisa