Make Your Own Yoghurt

Over the Christmas period, we were invited to friends for Saturday lunch and part of the dessert on offer was their home-made yoghurt - strawberry or coconut. It was so delicious that I came away with the intention of making my own yoghurt for a healthy 2015.  Yoghurt is easy and satisfying to create and will cost you pennies, plus it tastes great and has lots of healthy bacteria.

This year I am determined to make yoghurt at home regularly. Homemade yoghurt tastes great, and its manufacture is an easy, satisfying process. It is not all that expensive to buy yogurt, but it is still a good feeling to be buying milk for pennies instead of yogurt for pounds.

Homemade yoghurt is probably better for you, too. You can make it from the very best milk that you can find – organic, raw, from a single herd if you wish – and it will most likely have more of those delicious bacteria that we are hearing about all the time.

Looking for a suitable recipe, I found one on the Daily Telegraph website which suggests a good little trick - to add a bit of powdered milk to the yoghurt. This might seem a shade less “natural” but it makes the process faster and a bit more consistent, I’m told. It’s only adding a little dried milk to some fresh milk, after all. It also seems strange to have to use yoghurt in order to make yogurt, but of course once you’ve got it going you can then use your own yoghurt to start the process. However, if you make it every week, after a few months you might find your product becoming a bit “over the top”: a bit too sour and funky. You may have gathered too many rogue bacteria, and you can just reset the process by using shop-bought bacteria again.

Here is the Yoghurt recipe supplied by The Daily Telegraph that seems to work well. The key to this is to use the most delicious milk you can find. You can eschew the powdered milk if you want, but you will need to leave the yogurt to ferment for twice as long and sometimes the texture can be a little unusual. To make 1 litre, you need:-

Ingredients:
1 litre of whole milk
1 heaped tbsp of powdered milk
60g of natural full-fat yogurt

Method:

• Wash and sterilise a 1 litre jar or a few smaller ones.
• Place the milk in a saucepan and heat until a thermometer reads 175'F/80'C – do not let it boil.
• Take it off the heat and stir in the milk powder.

• When the temperature drops to 115F/45C, stir in the yogurt.
• Pour into the jar and seal with the lid. Place somewhere slightly warm such as an airing cupboard or near an oven (you can also wrap it in a towel to keep the heat in) for 4-6 hours – the longer the fermentation, the more tart the yogurt will taste.
• Place in the fridge for at least three hours to chill and firm up, then it’s ready to use.