domestic dilettante, humorless feminist shrew

We eat a lot of yogurt here. I eat it with muesli for breakfast every day, and we all eat it as a snack. Maura occasionally takes it in her lunch. The thing, though, is that I tend to like the expensive kind of yogurt–the $3.29 supermarket brand is okay, but what I really crave is the intense, slightly sour tang of Greek yogurt. For those of you who don’t share my craving, Greek yogurt is really expensive. At the cost club, I can buy a pound of it for, I think, about $5. That lasts less than a week–and that’s if I’m the only one eating it, and being restrained in my consumption at that! (No joke, I’d probably happily eat yogurt twice a day. Plus it gets used in pancakes, and salad dressings, and fruit dip, and…)

So when a friend of mine mentioned in her Facebook status that she was making yogurt, and I was intrigued. I’ve always loved the idea of making yogurt, but it sounded really intimidating. She insisted that it was easy, though, and with a bit of prodding, posted her recipe.

Last Friday, I decided to try my hand at making yogurt. If I messed it up, the only thing lost was $2 of milk, which seemed like an okay deal to me. So I hit the store and bought a gallon of milk (which, like I said, ran about two bucks,) and a six-ounce container of unflavored yogurt. (Greek, because that was the only small unflavored one I could find. It cost about a dollar on sale.) (Also, did you catch that? Six ounces of Greek yogurt costs a dollar–if it’s on sale. So expensive!)

I pulled out our largest Club Cookware pot, which is giant and cast iron and one of the many things that we inherited from Nick’s grandmother. It’s also very thick and retains heat really well, which is important for yogurt making.

In went the gallon of 2% milk. The first thing you do is heat the milk to 180, stirring constantly. I ignored the stirring constantly bit, which was a mistake–when I cleaned the pot the next morning, I found that there was a layer of burnt milk at the bottom, and there were a few little brown burnt-milk pieces in my finished yogurt. It didn’t seem to affect the taste at all, but it’s not especially attractive. Also, it’s a major pain in the ass to clean burnt-on milk. Just suck it up and stand there and stir. It only takes about ten minutes.

Once the milk’s hot, turn off the burner and walk away. I came upstairs and watched two episodes of Arrested Development, which we just started and are really enjoying so far. (We’re also watching Battlestar Galactica, but despite having seen it before, I don’t always have the stomach for that kind of drama.)

When you’re done watching television, go check your milk. When it’s cooled to between 110 and 120, you’re good to go. “Go”, in this instance, means dump in the plain yogurt you bought and stir it in. Pretty complicated, eh? After that’s mixed in, you put the lid on the pot and wrap the whole thing up in blankets or winter jackets or whatever–the goal is to keep the contents of the pot warm for as long as possible. If you have an oven with a pilot light, I’d just stick the pot in there. My oven does not have a pilot light, so I wrapped the pot in a hoodie, then pulled an insulated bag over the whole thing.

Go back to the television, or the internet, or whatever it is that you do in the evenings. Do your best to forget about the yogurt, and resist the urge to check on it, since lifting the lid will let heat escape.

In the morning, unwrap your pot and look inside–tada, yogurt! Mine was a bit thin (not too thin, just…on par with cheap supermarket yogurt, really,) and I blame that at least partly on forgetting to close the kitchen windows–it got pretty cold overnight, and when I checked the pot in the morning, everything was stone cold. Luckily, there’s an easy fix.

If your yogurt’s not as thick as you’d like, take a strainer and line it with a clean cloth napkin, some cheesecloth, or a few layers of paper towel. Dump the yogurt into the strainer and let it sit there for an hour or two (an hour gave me about the thickness of Yoplait; two hours gave me a nice, thick, Greek-style yogurt). You might have to do this in batches if your strainer’s not enormous, but it’s worth it.

After 24 hours and maybe 15 minutes of work, I ended up with four pounds of delicious yogurt, and we’ve already eaten over a pound of it, sweetening it just before eating. It’s much tastier than what we’ve been buying, and it’s cheaper and healthier, too. I suspect that yogurt making is going to become a weekly activity–when it’s this easy, it seems silly not to. The cost will go a little further next time, from $3 a batch to $2 a batch, since the next batch can use a cup of yogurt from this batch as starter.

If your family eats yogurt with any regularity, especially if you’re into Greek yogurt, you should definitely try this. In addition to all the stuff I’ve already mentioned, you feel incredibly accomplished. I made yogurt! There are whole factories, entire companies, that are dedicated to it, and I did it all by myself, in my kitchen. Pretty awesome.