Monday, November 24, 2008

Easy as Pie Homemade Yogurt

A cheap and easy recipe during a week of cooking expense (at least for those of us in America). Gather your ingredients, a heavy bottomed pan, clean jars, clean towel, whisk or spoon.
4 cups liquid milk. 3 Tablespoons powdered milk. 3 Tablespoons cornstarch. Sprinkle the powdered ingredients over the liquid milk in a heavy bottom pan. Whisk. Heat to scalding. Scald for 3 minutes. It's important not to let the milk boil.

From busy cooks http://busycooks.about.com/library/glossary/bldefscald2.htm
Scald means to heat a liquid, usually a dairy product, in a saucepan until it almost boils.
Remove from heat and let cool until you can stick your finger into the milk without burning your finger (not very scientific but it works when you don't have a thermometer). You want the mixture to be warm enough to incubate the live active cultures that you are about to add but not hot enough to kill them.
Add 2 Tablespoons of yogurt with live active cultures to your milk mixture and stir well. This can be from the supermarket or from your last batch of yogurt. If you shop for yogurt, make sure that it says on the label, "live active cultures."
Pour the yogurt mix into a jar. I use a canning jar. Wrap up like a baby and let it rest. I usually get at least a quart of yogurt from the recipe, but sometimes more, so I like to have a clean quart and pint jar handy, then put tin-foil over top, sit on a potholder and wrap up in a towel to incubate.
Check in a couple of hours. You should have a creamy, lovely yogurt that is as firm as store-bought. The longer you let the yogurt incubate, the tarter it will be.
We eat yogurt almost daily with granola, but it is also good as a sour cream substitute and I use it to make delicious wholewheat/oatmeal pancakes. Enjoy!

The original recipe was posted by Camy over at TWTM boards. Her blog is full of great homemaking tips and ideas. (http://marymarthame.blogspot.com/).

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