I eat yogurt. Seems like a lot of it. In Europe, it wasn’t such a big deal because you could buy a decent sized container pretty inexpensively – 1kg (a little more than a 32oz US container) for about 1.50\u20ac. Here though, yogurt is $4.00 and up for a 32oz container. I’m too cheap to buy that for long. <\/p>\n
So I thought I’d experiment with making my own yogurt. Yvonne has done it before, pretty successfully, and her sister living in The Netherlands makes it regularly; it’s pretty good, and her recipe is really simple. The yogurt I’ve really come to like though is a non-fat Greek yogurt; Oikos. Smooth, creamy, rich… You’d hardly guess there’s no fat in it. And the vanilla flavor is my fave. That’s<\/em> what I’d like to make.<\/p>\n I did some digging around online a couple of nights ago, and found a bunch of recipes that might work, and focused in on two in particular. This one<\/a> appealed to me because once it’s done setting up, it’s ready to eat; no fussing around straining the whey out of it. One of the ingredients is powdered milk, which I suppose helps it to firm up. But the whole business of using a heat source to keep it warm overnight is a bit much. This one<\/a> also appealed to me; it uses a Crock Pot for cooking the yogurt. The post-processing, straining out the whey with cheesecloth and all, was a bit too much. So, I took the positive features of both for my first experiment. <\/p>\n I mixed together the following ingredients:<\/p>\n I poured the gallon of milk into the Crock Pot, added the sugar & dry powdered milk, stirred it up well, then turned it on high until the mixture reached 180 degrees F. That took a couple of hours; using the slow cooker is genius for that because there’s no fussing over it and no worries that it’ll scald. Once it reached 180, I unplugged the cooker and waited for the temp to drop to 110 degrees F. That took a while; I waited up until 1 am for it to get there! Once it got to the proper temp, I stirred in the cup of yogurt (the culture that gets the whole batch going) then wrapped the crock in towels, and left it on the counter overnight. <\/p>\n The instructions say it should sit for for 14-15 hours. For best flavor they say to wait 14 hours, and 15 is best, but when I checked it at about 8 am (after just ~7 hours), it was thick and firm, and had a good taste to it. I decided to hold back though and waited until about 4 in the afternoon before really digging in, and I’m not sure if there was a lot of difference between that and what I tasted in the morning. The instructions also said the best flavor comes after chilling it for 2-4 days; I think it might be gone before then!<\/p>\n The consistency is a lot like what I’d expect from a Greek yogurt; thick, almost gel-like. Very smooth texture. I used whole milk, so it’s not the fat-free yogurt that is my ultimate goal. Yvonne says that the body needs some fat, but it seems like I don’t have a problem getting fat from other sources through the day, so I think it’s less important to have it in the yogurt. One of these next times I’ll try using some 2% or skim milk to get a low-fat\/fat-free variant.<\/p>\n This first experiment was a success, but I’m not sure if it was a big cost savings. My investment into it is as follows:<\/p>\n So the total is $11 and some change, which isn’t bad considering I yielded about a gallon of yogurt from it. The killer, cost-wise, was the powdered milk; next time I’m going to try one that doesn’t use the powdered milk and see how that goes. Stay tuned!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I eat yogurt. Seems like a lot of it. In Europe, it wasn’t such a big deal because you could buy a decent sized container pretty inexpensively – 1kg (a little more than a 32oz US container) for about 1.50\u20ac. Here though, yogurt is $4.00 and up for a 32oz container. I’m too cheap to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[504],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4719","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cooking-eating"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davintosh.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4719","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davintosh.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davintosh.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davintosh.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davintosh.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4719"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/davintosh.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4719\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davintosh.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4719"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davintosh.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4719"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davintosh.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4719"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
\n