Fresh homemade yogurt. My life is now complete.

I’m trying to remember how Mom did this exactly.  We made the yogurt last week and I’ve been eating it since.  I have been wanting to make our own homemade yogurt for months.

Start with a gallon of whole milk in a pot. You can use less fat milk, but we wanted to start with the whole fat experience.

Warm the milk to 160 degrees and then let it cool to 116. (I thought it was 119, but she remembers 116 and neither of us have the cookbook in front of us, so we’ll go with 116).

Once cool- add 2T of active yogurt per quart. So that was something like 8 tablespoons (1/2 cup) for the whole gallon of milk.

Then put the milk in a water bath. We put ours in quart jars in a water bath in the oven.  With the oven on low, we checked the temperature periodically, adding warmer water to the bath when needed.

Keep warm 6 hours. At 6 hours we put ours in the fridge, though I think they could have just stayed in the oven overnight.  Our yogurt came out a bit thinner than we wanted, so we put it in a colander lined with coffee filters and strained it the next day for a few hours. We ended up with about a quart of liquid removed and the thickest tastiest greek yogurt you can imagine.  Incredible.

Straining the yogurt

Eating the yogurt this morning with mom’s fresh blueberry jam.