Making Yogurt

A few weeks ago I tried (and failed horribly) making my own yogurt. I went to this web site and followed the directions as best I could with the resources I had. So why did it fail? Well.... to start, I don't have a double boiler, so I just used my gigantic canner and my large saucepan to create the water jacket. This was a bad idea because the canner takes FOREVER to heat up the water, and therefore the milk, and it was very difficult to get the hot saucepan out of the hot canner when it's full of hot milk! In fact, while I was lifting the pot of hot milk the handle of my pan fell off! This caused a major spill and luckily no burns. After appropriately cooling the milk to the right temperature I set it on the heating pad (set to medium), covered it with a towel and returned 7 hours later only to discover that my heating pad has an auto shut off and hadn't been on. So for all my effort..... soupy, sour milk. NOT worth it!

Only slightly deterred from the endeavor I tried again...

*Sanitizing the utensils



*Heating the milk to 185 degrees



*Cooling the milk to 110 degrees



* After pitching the dannon plain yogurt for fermentation, I set the pan of milk on the heating pad, and the heating pad on my cutting board, covered the milk with a lid and wrapped the whole thing in a towel. This time I stayed near the kitchen and turned the heating pad back on every hour.



*7 hours later, I had pudding like, sour smelling milk with greenish liquid on top (just what you want to see).





*I stirred it up really well



*Poured it into containers



*Placed it in the fridge overnight, and wa la!



*Yogurt!



OK, so here's the thing... I didn't really like it. It was too runny, and lacked tartness big time.

I think I'll try it again one more time doing two things differently;
-I'll add some powdered milk to thicken it up
-and let it ferment a hour longer

I'll let you know how it goes!