Spring Fever: Playing with milk

Spring is the time to plant gardens in an attempt to lessen your family's dependence on the outside world a little bit, yes?  It's fun, it's a good teaching/learning opportunity for all family members no matter how young or old, and if planned well can be pretty easy.  I'm not an expert gardener, and at this point I'm still working on landscaping so I don't have a place to plant anything yet... but my point is along these lines.

I love yogurt.  I grew up on yogurt and vegetable soup.  I've always been picky about which brands I like, what flavors, all of that.  I'm a picky eater and I'm finding it easier to work around foods I don't like but still come up with fantastic meals.  One ingredient that I absolutely can't tolerate is mayonnaise.  If mayo has come within 6 inches of anything I'm planning to eat I can taste it on there and it makes me gag.  I'm not sure why, exactly... the ingredients are all fine.  Do you know how hard it is to go to a cookout and avoid mayo?  It's the go-to base for most typical American salads and dressings.  I won't even go into fried foods.

Before I get too far off track, back to yogurt.   Thick yogurt can be substituted in most recipes that use sour cream or mayo, both things I don't like the taste of, as well as a surprising list of other personal-care uses.  Mom used to make her own yogurt all the time so she had a little yogurt maker.  With the food prices rising the way they are now and our recent discovery of how much we all looooove Greek yogurt, she got the yogurt maker back out, much to my surprise.  I was so little when she used it before I didn't even realize she had it and how easy it was.

Start with milk.  Any kind you like, any fat content, cow or goat.  I haven't tried almond or soy milk with this yet, and it may not work with the cultures, but I haven't done any research on it.  Next you need some starter cultures.  There are tons of options here depending on how probiotic or specialized you want it to be.  We started with this one that we found at the Earth Goods store in town.  Actually, you really only need one starter packet to get started if you reserve 1/4-1/2 cup of your yogurt from your batch to start the next one.  My yogurt maker will hold 4 cups of milk, so to allow for my starter I heat up 3 1/4 cups skim milk to about 110 degrees F.  Most instruction booklets tell you to boil the milk then let it cool, but all that does is pasteurize the milk again and kill more of the beneficial enzymes that survived pasteurizing in the first place.  Starting with regular pasteurized milk, I don't boil it because I don't want to scorch it and I want some nutrition to survive.  Then I add 1/2 cup dry fat free milk to naturally thicken it up.  Mom found a great article in one of her magazines about yogurt making so that's where I got most of these tips.  First I tried a packet of gelatin to thicken it after my first batch was way too runny, but that didn't work either.  Dry milk is just right!  When the milk is the right temperature (too hot and it kills the cultures, too cold and they don't activate), I add in my reserved previous batch and stir it in well before pouring it all into the yogurt maker jars.

All yogurt makers are essentially the same.  They come with 5-8 small jars and keep the cultured milk at a steady temperature of 105-115 degrees F for as long as you set the timer for.  Mom ordered this one for me and it works great.  Hers is about 30 years old and she ordered some replacement jars at the same time, but it still works just fine.  The longer the yogurt cultures, the tangier it gets.  At first I thought longer culturing would result in thicker yogurt, but instead it ended up way too tart for me.  The instructions that came with my yogurt maker said to start with 10 hours and adjust from there, but this time I only went for 8 hours.  With the dry milk, it was nice and thick but with a smooth mild flavor. Make sure it chills first before you eat it, though.

Next, you can strain it to thicken it a little more.  If you can get the hang of cheesecloth, that's great, but it ended up being way too much trouble for us.  When Mom ordered her replacement jars and the yogurt maker for me she also ordered a yogurt cheese maker, which really is just a plastic container with a built-in strainer.  If you just strain your yogurt for a couple of hours it'll thicken nicely and you won't get that watery separation.  The watery part is whey, which has a long list of health benefits and i plan to experiment with it so as to not waste something so nutritionally potent.  First thing I'll try with mine is substituting it for milk when I make bread.  The mistake I made with this batch of yogurt, being my first batch with dry milk, was that I let it strain overnight so I ended up with a very thick cream-cheese textured yogurt cheese, which wasn't what I wanted, but it's great on toast with a touch of unsweetened strawberry preserves!  Also, that one little piece of toast was surprisingly filling.  I have another batch running now so I'll probably save some yogurt cheese for toast but mix the rest in with today's batch so I have one large batch of thick, mild yogurt to eat for breakfast with some of my homemade granola.  Yum!