Yogurt making

   And the question of the day is....how do you make yogurt? It is really easy! The further I get into the quest for real food the more amazed I am at how lazy we are. Seriously....I am the queen of as little effort as possible to achieve the maximum result possible, but I think that on the timeline of food, we've definitely missed the maximum result. You're looking at a peach yogurt, a strawberry yogurt and a vanilla yogurt....the vanilla is actually much lighter then the pic...I'm not sure why it looks so dark on here...

   My friend Kathie makes her own yogurt regularly so I asked her how she does it and took what she said, and the link she sent me with information on it, and put them together. First I took the biggest pot I have and the second biggest pot I have and I filled the biggest with water and put the second biggest inside it to make a double boiler. I filled the 2nd pot with milk. The amount of milk you put in here will be the amount of yogurt you get so you can make this as much or as little as you want. I then heated the milk up to 185 degrees and maintained it at this temperature for about 10 minutes (Next time I will try and maintain it for closer to the 30 min recommended for thicker yogurt). While this was boiling I put a large glass bowl in my sink and filled the sink around the pot with ice water. I dumped the milk into this bowl and chilled the milk down to 110 while stirring the milk to make sure it cooled evenly. When the milk gets to 110, add a few tablespoons of live culture plain yogurt (after the first batch, you can save some of your own yogurt to mix use as the starter, but the first time, use a store bought brand...I used Stoneyfield Farms). I went ahead and put the yogurt into jars at this point and sealed them and placed them in a cooler. I then took the water I boiled earlier and poured it over the jars and added extra hot tap water to the cooler to keep the jars warm. I closed the cooler, and left it there overnight. When I woke up, I had yogurt. I stirred the jars a bit and then put the jars in the refrigerator for a few hours in order to thicken a bit.

    A lot of people leave the yogurt plan and flavor as you eat it...I opted to go ahead and flavor a head of time and leave it jarred in different flavored jars. To make the strawberry, I took a quart of strawberries and pureed them in my food processor and added strawberry puree and blue agave sweetener to taste. I did the same for the peach as well. I then realized I had some frozen blackberries in my freezer from last year and defrosted them and used them as well. The last flavor I made was vanilla. I took about 2 tbsp's of vanilla extract and a tsp of blue agave and it came out great as well! I think I may like this better then the yogurt you can by and I know there are way way way fewer ingredients in mine then there are in the store bought ingredients.
 

    The even more awesome part of this was making the go-gurt pouches. Jonah is a go-gurt addict. Those things get expensive...and they have lots and lots of sugar in them...and if you've met my sweet boy, you know sugar is not something extra he needs. My dad got me a food saver for my birthday (I'm such a crazy crazy exciting person, did you know you could make vegetable steam bags with that thing??) so I took the bags and made little pouches with them, and cut the top of the pouch, filled it with yogurt and resealed it. It took a few rounds of practice, but then Diane and I got a nice little assembly line going, and now Jonah has about 20 pouches with more in them then a normal go-gurt with a much much healthier alternative.

   I really didn't think that this would work so well, so I wasn't really good about taking pictures while I was making the yogurt, so I definitely will take pictures next time. I think I will probably make it in smaller quantities so it takes less time next time. I will probably make a half gallon and call it good next time :-) I think I will probably let Jonah help me next time since it will be pretty hard for it to be messed up as long as the temperatures are controlled and he loves to be helpful.