Making Yogurt

It really is quite amazing how simple it is to make your own yogurt.  Ever since my good friend Linda has bought me a yogurt-making machine, I haven't been buying any at the store at all!  Even Charlie eat it with me:

I think I may have posted some of these photos already.  Linda gave me a yogurt starter:

And this cute little yogurt maker.  Although I'm not sure if the timer on this works properly.  When the timer says 8 hours, the machine is still cooking even after 9 or 10 hours!  

So most of the time I just leave it and let it do its thing overnight.  And by morning, I put the bowl into the fridge and then, ta da! We have yogurt!

It normally turns out a bit watery and you can strain it, but I do like it with quite a bit of that whey.  I accidentally left it in the maker for a whole day and the yogurt was still edible/didn't go sour.  Or at least I didn't get sick after eating it.  Ha ha!

Charlie has gotten into the habit of eating the yogurt with granola in the morning as well.  It does come out a bit tangier than the ones in the supermarket but he doesn't mind it too much:

And after a couple of yogurt-making sessions, I eventually bought a new thermometer to help ease the process.  Here's my setup on the stove.  Ha ha!

So I boil 4 cups of milk until it reaches the temperature of 160F.  My thermometer will beep when it does that.  And then, I take the milk off the stove and set a timer to 30 minutes and that's about the time the temperature comes down to 110F.  I put the thermometer back in the milk and when it does reach 110F, I dump some of the previous yogurt (that now acts as the starter), stir it up a little bit, and then dump the whole thing into the yogurt maker glass container.  Turn it on and set it to "cook" for about 10 hours. Easy peasy! Everyone is getting a yogurt maker this Christmas. LOL!!!