I successfully made yogurt the other day. We’ve been eating up it’s yummy goodness for the last couple days… so I thought I’d share. Once you make the yogurt you can place a cheese cloth inside a stainless steel strainer and strain the whey from the yogurt, creating a yogurt cheese. (I suggest adding some salt to that yogurt prior to straining it.) The cheese is also very very delicious. Perfect as a cream cheese substitute.

Since the directions are hard to read I thought I’d paraphrase them below:

Ingredients:
1/2 gal milk
1/2 cup of fresh yogurt. In this case I used dannon’s low fat plain yogurt.

Preheat your oven to 200 degrees.
Pour milk into a large pan. Heating the milk until it reaches 185 degrees. Be careful not to burn the milk. It is not necessary to heat the milk past 185 degrees. Once heated, cool the milk back down to 120 degrees. I placed the pan in a sink filled with cool water. Watching my thermometer to ensure that the yogurt didn’t get too cool.

While that milk is cooling, take a cup of the (now cooled) scalded milk and mix it in another container with the 1/2 cup of yogurt. Pour that milk/yogurt slurry back into the pan with the cooled milk. Stir until homogenized. (blended.) Once blended pour the milk/yogurt mix into a glass container. Ideally you’ll have jars to use… I’m just cheap and out of jars, so I used what was available. A large glass (sterilized) baking dish. I turned the oven off, wrapped the glass baking dish in a towl (yes, I had a lid on the dish) and placed it in the oven.

Be careful to not have the towel touch any part of the oven that might cause a fire. Remember, we’re all adults here. Use your own common sense.

After two hours I turned the oven back on to 200 degrees for 10 minutes. Just so that I could keep the temperature in the oven warm. Because the glass container is insulated, the milk should stay pretty constantly at 120 degrees. Two hours later I did the same thing and reheated the oven to 200 degrees. All said and done, it took me about 6 hours to declare my yogurt “Done.” (Yes, I peeked and taste/tested.)

I placed the unwrapped baking dish in the fridge to cool over night and the next morning I put the yogurt in the plastic containers.

It’s more than enough yogurt for the entire week. AND it only cost me a dollar for the milk and 50 cents for the dannon starter.