YogurtWhat you will need:

Milk--I use the Kroger brand organic whole milk. I have used other types also and found this to be the best tasting and easiest to use.

Yogurt starter--I use Plain Dannon, but you can use anything as long as it has live cultures. I’ve read that the final yogurt will taste like the starter, but that’s not really true.

Jars--I use quart size Ball Jars. Pints are fine, too, but we eat a lot of yogurt.

Candy Thermometer and wire whisk

You will also need a plastic basin and a cooler--These are for the hot water incubation bath. One final thing is a pitcher. This is handy for pouring the hot milk into the jars. When I pour directly from the stock pot, I always make a mess.

Making homemade yogurt has three basic steps.

1. Scald the milk (Heat to 80 Celsius or 175 Fahrenheit). This is important because making yogurt is basically growing bacteria. You want to make sure that you kill all of the bad bacteria in the milk before you start incubating the good bacteria.

2. Cool the milk (Cool to 50 Celsius or 125 Fahrenheit) and add starter. The good bacteria will only grow 85-125 Fahrenheit.

3. Incubate 6-8 hours in a hot water bath and let settle in the refrigerator overnight.

How to proceed:

Scald the milk: Pour the milk into the stock pot and set stove top to medium or medium-high heat. It is important to heat the milk slowly to avoid cooking it or burning it onto the bottom of the pot. Stir frequently with a wire whisk and check the temperature often. When it is getting close, the milk with begin to froth and a little steam will rise. Also, it takes a while to go from cool to 150, but going from 150 to 175 is very quick, so watch closely once you get to 150 or 160.

Cool the milk: Once the milk reaches 175, take it off of the heat and stir with the whisk. It is inevitable that some of the milk will stick to the bottom of the pot, but stirring now will help. Put the pot in an ice bath in the kitchen sink. When I put the pot in the sink, I leave the lid on while I’m adding ice to keep the ice from falling into the hot milk. Once the ice is in the sink I remove the lid and let it cool. Be careful not to work over the sink to avoid getting junk in the milk. You don’t want to introduce bacteria when you’ve just gone to the trouble of killing it.

Once the milk has cooled to around 125, pour it into a pitcher.

Add a spoonful of yogurt to each empty jar, and pour the hot milk into the jars.

As you are doing this, let the faucet run on the hottest setting. I have found that the hottest tap water is sufficiently hot for the incubation bath. Add hot tap water to the plastic basin so that when you add the yogurt containers, the water is nearly to the bottom of the metal lids. Then put the plastic tub in a cooler. Close the cooler and let it sit for 6-8 hours. In the summer the cooler is outside since it’s so hot here. In the winter I bring it in.

Notes:You can vary several things in this recipe to achieve different tasting yogurts. In general, incubating for a longer time yields yogurt that is more tart. Also, incubating at higher temperatures gives a tarter yogurt. I like to incubate at 125 for 8 hours because I like a tart yogurt, and because I know that the hot bath and cooler will leak heat, so it is actually a little bit lower average incubation temperature.

The starter yogurt is supposed to make a difference in the final taste, but I have found that the milk you use and the variations in incubation time/temperature actually make a much bigger difference, and Dannon has always worked well for me. I’m pretty sure Brown Cow or Stonyfield would work, too.

Once I take the yogurt out of the bath, I let it sit in the refrigerator overnight to set. I don’t use pectin or any other congealing agent, so it is a little runny when I first take it out of the bath. I try not to disturb it very much as I put it in the refrigerator. After several hours in the refrigerator it is usually a good consistency. Before I eat it I usually do strain it to make it a little bit thicker. To do this I use a wire strainer in a small cooking pot. I line the strainer with a white paper towel (with not ink or designs).

I let it strain for about 2 hours and then transfer it to a tupperware container. If you want it really thick strain it longer. You strain it too long and it is too thick for your taste, you can always pour some of the whey in the pot back into the yogurt and stir until it is remixed.