Home-made yogurt

I have been searching all over the places for a yogurt machine in Australia. No luck until I spotted one in David Jones, downtown Perth during my recent trip. So I carried one all the way home from West Australia (of course I saw the same model for sale at a local Harvey Norman store just now--it looks like Australians just care enough to make their own).

Both MM and I love yogurt and our days don't go buy without digging into a jar of yogurt. So it makes sense to make our own. Plus the ones sold in the store tend to be loaded with sugar and ingredients that don't sound so desirable (stabilizer? food acid? gelatin?) . It is much healthier just to add fruit to homemade yogurt.

This is the final product of my 3rd try, which is the best result so far. It tastes very good (MM 's testimony) and the texture was about right. Even better it is organic because both the milk and the starter are organic.

Ingredients: 1 liter of milk + half cup of yogurt with living culture as a starter

1. Boil the milk and cool it down to about lukewarm (the recipe book says 43C; I don't have a thermometer so I just use my finger--if it doesn't feel uncomfortable when sticking in the milk, that it is fine).
2. Whisk the starter with the milk and decide how fast you want to incubate the yogurt, my yogurt machine has 10 settings, with incubation time ranging from 1 hour to 10 hours. Somehow my intuition says the longer the better, so I have been set it to 10 hours and leave the machine on overnight.
3. The next morning move the yogurt to the fridge for it to be "set". The bacteria seems to be settled down and the texture of the yogurt becomes less liquid during the period. I haven't tested how long is enough but half a day works.


Tips:

Keep an eye on your milk when heating is up and stir it now and then. I burned my milk the 2nd time I tried. Bacteria didn't mind but MM did and he refused to eat any of my charcoal-flavored yogurt.

I still need to do experiments on which starter/milk combination works the best and what difference different choices make. Although I used berry yogurt as the starter the flavor doesn't seem to be carried into the final product.

My procedure takes about 24 hours now. This is easy to handle so I don't have to deal with it in middle of my days but the downside is that one has to plan ahead. If you want fresh yogurt for breakfast, you have to start to boil your milk this morning.