Homemade Yogurt
This yogurt is great with cereal, granola, dried fruits, fresh fruits - you really can't go wrong. You can make yogurt using milk and yogurt with any fat content that you like, just make sure the yogurt has live cultures. The yogurt in the above photo was made with fat free organic greek yogurt and 1% milk. Incredibly creamy and my best batch yet.
These amounts are only guidelines and do not have to be exact. Your yogurt maker may hold a different amount of yogurt. You don't need a full 6 ounces of yogurt to start out with, you can use as little as 2 ounces, but I just find it easier to use a whole container. If you're going to use less yogurt, just add a bit more milk to make up for it, and keep in mind that some of the liquid evaporates during the heating process so you will end up with slightly less volume than you started with.
You can flavor or sweeten the yogurt before incubating it. Just make sure to keep one container plain to make your next batch with.
5 cups (40 oz) milk
2/3 cup (46 g) nonfat dry milk powder
6 oz plain yogurt with live cultures
Turn on yogurt maker to preheat the containers.
Fill sink or large bowl with a couple inches of ice water. This will be used to help cool off the milk later.
Place yogurt in a small bowl and set aside.
Place cold milk in top of a double boiler and stir in milk powder.
Heat to 200°F, stirring gently and hold for 10 minutes, making sure not to boil.
Place top of double boiler in the ice water to rapidly cool milk to 112°-115°F.
Remove pan from water.
Remove one cup of the warm milk and blend it with the yogurt. Add it back to the rest of the milk. Temp should now be 110°-112°F.
Pour immediately into clean hot containers and incubate about 4 hours. Yogurt should be set.
Refrigerate immediately. Eat within 10 days.
Recipes using yogurt:
Blueberry Frozen Yogurt
Strawberry-Mango Frozen Yogurt
Honey-Vanilla Frozen Yogurt
Banana Bread
Yogurt Cake