I used to make my own yogurt, back in the 1970s. It's fairly simple. Take one part active culture yogurt, mix it with five parts milk, warm it to about 110F. Then wrap it in towels or other insulation, so it stays warm a good long time, and don't move it or bump it.

It was pretty easy to find active culture yogurt back in the 1970s. It was the stuff from Dannon, with the fruit on the bottom, and you had to stir it up. Everybody else was selling pasteurized yogurt.

Or You Could

The longer you culture yogurt, the tangier it gets, and the thicker it gets. If you don't like it so tangy, you can culture it for a shorter period of time. If you want it thick without being too tangy, you can add in some non-fat milk solids - which your grocery store calls "powdered milk".

It's not rocket science. You add whatever flavoring you like - I favor plain yogurt, but Mama liked it best with some dark sour cherry pie filling added - but remember to leave part of your yogurt unflavored so you can use it as the starter for the next batch, instead of buying more Dannon.

Yogurt Has Changed

It's getting harder and harder to find real yogurt in the stores. There are all sorts of products out there that are made from skim milk instead of real milk, and products that have been adulterated with chemical sweeteners, or flavorings, or are pasteurized, or otherwise screwed up.

I won't deny it; I'm lazy and I'm getting lazier with each passing year, but I'm also a cheapskate, and I hate the annoyance of having to hunt for what I want. Like most men, I'm not a shopper, I'm a buyer.

And the annoyance level has reached the point where I decided I would have to start making my own yogurt again.

No Dannon!

There wasn't any "stir-from-the-bottom" Dannon at the store I where I was getting groceries. (If you're curious, it's Glenwood Discount Foods, a used grocery store on 322 at Martindale Road.) However, they did have Pequea Valley Farms yogurt, which said it was "Homemade with golden creamy milk from grass-fed Jersey cows" and listed ingredients as "pasteurized whole milk and live active cultures."

It wasn't cheap. The used grocery stores almost always charge $3 for a carton of 12 boxes of yogurt. Those boxes are 8 ounces, so they would have 3 quarts of yogurt in a carton. For the PV Farms yogurt, the price was $3.69. Ouch. But I wasn't about to go to WalMart or one of the other new grocery stores and hunt and hunt for something with live cultures.

I also went to my raw milk source, Conestoga Valley Dairy, and picked up my regular milk purchase, plus an extra gallon to make yogurt with. It's just a couple of miles away, and that's the reason I was at Glenwood Discount Foods, rather than Sharp Shopper or Amelia's, the other two used grocery stores I deal with. (The closest used grocery store is B&B's, out past Willow Street, but it's always crowded, and their prices aren't as good.)

Making Yogurt

I warmed up about 3 quarts of the milk in a commercial-grade 5-quart saucepan. (They have really nice stuff, off and on, at Ollie's, at good prices. They also have some real junk. That's all right; some people want to buy junk, because they think it's cheaper. I figure food costs a lot, and shoddy saucepans are no bargain.)

I have an electronic thermometer, with a probe on a cable. It cost about $20 or $25 at one of those outlet stores out on US 30, I can't remember which one. I have a hard time reading a glass thermometer, and metal thermometers are notoriously inaccurate, so this was a another wise purchase that pained me greatly. It's very accurate, and it's very responsive. It'll come in handy if I ever get around to learning how to make candy. In the meanwhile, it's nice for checking meat for doneness and for checking oil for french-frying.

I didn't want to kill off the beneficial organisms in the raw milk, so I didn't take the milk up to 170F and let it cool to 110F, like you're supposed to. (If you use store-bought milk, it's probably a good idea to go the 170F route, because there's nothing in the store-bought milk to protect it from harmful organisms.) Instead, I slowly heated it until it just barely got to 110F, then I stirred in the entire quart of yogurt, which made the temperature plunge, and allowed it to rise to 110F again. I used a wire whisk to stir everything thoroughly. (I did scald the wire whisk thoroughly, to make sure it wasn't introducing any pathogens, by boiling it for 20 minutes in that heavy saucepan before I started. What, you thought I was careless with the saucepan?)

Packing The Yogurt

I had bought some plastic tubs to put the yogurt in. I thought about buying 8-ounce styro coffee cups and lids, but coffee cup lids have a pinhole in them, so I considered that suboptimal. I ended up getting some 16-ounce polypropylene tubs with screw-on lids, as that was the closest I could find to what I really wanted.

Once the warm innoculated milk was ladled into the tubs and the lids screwed on, I put them in a plastic ice chest, filled the empty space in the ice chest with towels, put the lid back on, and waited for 8 hours.

Or, at least, that's what I thought I was doing. About 2 hours in, Blondie called to me for help. She had already moved the ice chest to the side, and had it sitting at an angle. Oh, shoot. I carefully put it back on a flat surface, and threatened Blondie with dire consequences - what those would have been, I have no idea - if she touched the ice chest again. And after 8 hours, I checked the yogurt. It was still runny!

Filthy Liars

Jarring yogurt while it is being made isn't the end of the world. It doesn't set up right - but it does sorta get thick. This stuff was no more runny than milk is.

My conclusion? Pequea Valley Farm is lying about the yogurt. It may be made from active yogurt cultures - in fact, there's no other way to make yogurt - but the obviously pasteurize the yogurt when they are done. I was livid.

Except it's been several days, and I just now went down to fetch the box that the PV Farm yogurt came in. I actually measured a little wrong, and had not only enough yogurt to fill the six boxes I bought, but more besides, so I put the extra back into the PV Farm yogurt box, and put it in with the other boxes to culture.

It Lives!

It turns out that the yogurt eventually cultured. Now, I'm used to making yogurt with 1 part yogurt to 5 parts milk, and this time, I used 1 part yogurt to 3 parts milk, so if anything, it should have been quicker to get thick and set up than I'm used to.

Now, that suggests one of three things has happened. Possibly, raw milk cultures differently than store-bought milk, because it already has other biologicals in the milk. Possibly, the ice chest didn't keep stuff as warm as it should have. Or possibly, the PV Farm yogurt has very low levels of live yogurt cultures. Or maybe Blondie screwed the whole thing up.

Some people would be afraid to eat the yogurt, it having spent days at room temperature. I'm not. Between the cultures already in the raw milk, and the cultures introduced in the yogurt, there's going to be a lot of competition for nutrients, and pathogens aren't going to have much opportunity to get a foothold. Besides, I took exceptional care when I was making the yogurt to prevent pathogens from being introduced. But it's awfully tangy. I'll be getting more milk on Monday, and making a new batch of yogurt.

You're Probably Not So Foolish

I'm probably more fatalistic than you are. I'm old; I'm not going to live that many more years anyway. You probably want to play it safe. And you probably don't have a source of raw milk. So I'm going to suggest that you take the milk up to 170F and let it cool down, and then add your culture. And just so you get it right the first time, there being so many piddling little things that can go wrong, you might want to consider buying a yogurt culture.

Or WINNING one. If you follow this link, you can win three cultures - yogurt, sourdough, kombucha and more. You may never have heard of kombucha; it's a cultured tea.

RSS Feeds & Sharpreader

In any case, there's a link on the Cheeseslave blog to click, and you get an entry for that. You also get entries for signing up for RSS feeds of the Cheeseslave and the Real Food Media sites (you'll want an RSS reader to follow them and to follow Canthook as well; I recommend Sharpreader) and for signing up for their email newsletters (which gives you a total of 4 entries.)

I'll give you a suggestion, though, about RSS feeds. It's often a hassle to get the RSS subscription mechanism on websites to work. Instead, just take the URL of a page on the site, and enter it in the top of Sharpreader. Sharpreader is pretty good about finding the RSS feed for the site. You'll see a list of the recent posts, and you simply click on the "subscribe" button in Sharpreader.

In Any Case

In any case, I think I own an apology to PV Farm for believing they had deceptive labels on their yogurt. I'm not sure, but I think I owe the apology. I'll be making that next batch of yogurt soon, so if they're being black hats, I'll have plenty of opportunity to tell you.

I'm going to try an experiment, though, for my next batch. I think I'll use some quart mason jars as "heated water bottles" to keep the yogurt warm while it is culturing. After 2-3 hours, I'll take them out, and replace them with other "heated water bottles". I don't know if it will make a difference, but it's worth trying.

Other Bloggers On Related Topics:
Amelia - cheeseslave - Dannon - digital thermometer - free culture drawing - Glenwood Discount Foods - making yogurt - Ollie's - Pequea Valley Farm - raw milk - Real Foods Media - Sharp Shopper