A Little More In-depth With Homemade Yogurt

So my earlier post about making our own yogurt was brief but lacking in any real resources that could be useful. We made some again last night and I'm going to go into a little more detail this time:

Homemade Fat Free Organic Yogurt

For starters we use Horizon Fat Free Organic Milk (I know some people don't like Horizon but we are still trying to find a local source for milk). Both of us are trying to watch our overall caloric intake so we use the fat free type of milk.

1. Pour 42 ounces (5.25 cups) into a pot and set to boil stirring occasionally. It can burn very easily. We double boiled it (boiled water in a pot with another pot above) until it was almost ready and then switched to the main pot to finish.
2. Once the milk starts to boil remove it from the heat and allow it to cool to 95ºF. We put it outside with a dishtowel over it.
3. Take your culture (in our case we use a container of plain organic yogurt we bought at the store for a starter and then we can use one of our jars of yogurt for the next starter) mix it up with some of the milk in a bowel.
4. Once it is mixed in add it to the rest of the milk and stir it up good making sure there are no large chunks of yogurt floating around. This is the point where you would add any flavoring in as well, though we don't.
5. Pour the mixture equally in all seven jars and put the jars in the yogurt maker without the lids on them.
6. Cover the yogurt maker, turn it on, and don't disturb it for 12 hours (the time changes with the type of milk you use: fat free, 2%, whole).
7. Take the jars out after 12 hours, put the lids on them, and put them in the fridge for at least 3 hours before eating.
8. In our case we add honey we get from the local farmer's market or granola to the jars and enjoy them.

I think this process is great for two reasons. One is that it gives us a better connection with the food we are eating and we know exactly what goes in them (aside from any additives in the initial yogurt and milk). And the second is the complete lack of packaging. We go from this:

To this:

And we can wash the jars and use them over and over again. Nothing being produced, wasted, or recycled. An overall win.

Nutritional Facts:

Costs:

The milk cost us about $6/gallon though there are coupons available from time to time and the yogurt we used as a culture cost $1.

128 oz = to 1 gallon

42/128 = 0.328125 gallons

42 oz costs $1.97 roughly

$2.97/7 containers = 42¢ each

(The yogurt maker is 13-watt so far 12 hours it uses 156 watts or 0.156 kW. Our electric rate is 0.8545 kWh. So it costs 1.33302¢ total for electricity or .190431¢ each jar which doesn't round up the 42¢)

In other words it costs less than half of organic yogurt when it is on sale. Not bad for a little bit of work that helps reconnect you to your food.