Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Homemade Yogurt

I said to someone at work today that I made my own yogurt. (And yes, it was in response to a question, it wasn't like I was just throwing that out there, looking for accolades.) She responded "good God, that's like making your own lettuce, do you know that?"

It's not quite that bad, I mean, I have been known to make my own pasta and bread and marshmallows, and yogurt is way easier than all of those. (And they are all pretty easy. One of my friends once accused me of being an 'overacheiver', and I've barely forgiven her for it. I'm one of the laziest people God ever made, and things have to to be either criminally easy or have an enormous payoff for me to make them. Yogurt is both.)
All you have to do to make yogurt is A) have a yogurt maker (an essential part of the process), B) heat some milk C) pour it into the yogurt maker and ignore it for 6 hours or so. That's about it. But the yogurt is fabulous (which is a hard adjective to apply to yogurt, but truly, it is.) It is thick and rich and nowhere near as startlingly tangy as the commercial stuff. Here is my yogurt maker, which cost all of 20 bucks, and does the job admirably. I usually make plain yogurt and doctor it up as necessary, but occasionally I lob in some jam or fruit or syrup at the bottom, before it goes into the maker. (Successes: maple syrup, berries, apricot jam. Disasters: lemon curd (mind-numbingly sour), chocolate syrup (a memory I don't want to revisit) and bananas (brown, slimy lumps of goo.)
Here is my finished product, jazzed up with some strawberries and blueberries, a little clover honey and some granola on the top. It was much better than homemade lettuce could ever be.


1 comment:

Erin said...

OH MY WORD! Now it's yogurt?? I am speechless. However, I would like a better explanation of how to make my own taco shells, please and thank you. Would you mind sending that one along in your spare time when you're not roasting your raw coffee beans, or whipping up some home-made ketchup, or pasteurizing your homemade milk?? Pretty please??