We love yogurt! The good yogurt is so expensive though. I don’t buy it nearly as much a I would like. Last year when we were milking Epie, I experimented with making yogurt, and I made at least a gallon a week during most of the milking season. It was one of the things I missed most when we dried her up.
The process to making homemade yogurt was an interesting one for me. It took a few tries and lots of searching the internet before I could get consistent results.
The crockpot method utterly failed for me. I probably did something wrong…I think the crockpot got too hot or something. I’m not really sure. But, I decided not to try it again. I didn’t like cleaning the pot out! 🙂
I wanted to try the cooler method, but my cooler is small and would only hold a couple of pints. If I’m going to go through heating milk to make yogurt, I want to make a gallon at a time.
When I came across the heating pad method, I felt like a finally had a winner. I had all of the required pieces of equipment. I could make a gallon at a time. I tried it, and it worked! The only downside…my heating pad automatically shuts off after an hour or so.
Because of this safety feature, I had to constantly babysit my yogurt during the seven hours it takes to incubate. It was a little annoying, but since it resulted in good yogurt, I decided it was worth it. However, with everything going on in life, sometimes the yogurt would cool down too much during this process and I’d get a really runny batch. But since the crockpot and cooler didn’t work for me, I figured this was as good as it could get.
But today when I was preparing more plums to be dehydrated, I realized that our Excalibur dehydrate had a yogurt feature. I don’t know why I hadn’t noticed it before. I did some measuring and I think I can fit four quart jars in there when I take all the trays out.I did some quick searching on Google, and found a great tutorial.
I’m so excited to give that a try with tonight’s milking. I’ll let you know how Maggie yogurt turns out.
Have you ever made yogurt? What method did you use?
