Wednesday, July 11, 2012

More Milk Madness

Sean here.  Sonja's under the weather so I promised to update our readers about our most recent excursions into the world of dairy goodness.  With a very successful and palatable cheese under our belt, we decided to dive into yogurt.  Not literally of course (although an interesting visual).  We followed a recipe for goat's milk yogurt online that ended up working pretty well.  I will repeat the steps here but I feel I must preface it with a disclaimer.  Goat's milk behaves very differently from cow's milk in pretty much every fashion, including yogurt fermentation.  The yogurt we made may be too thin for many, and resembles very thick milk.  The taste was ideal though, and I loved it with some frozen blueberries, fresh strawberries and a spoon of sugar.

Start with at least a quart of fresh goat's milk.  It can be refridgerated, or straight from the barn.  Heat up to 180 degrees and hold it there for 20 minutes, stirring frequently to prevent scorching.  We used two pots, one with the milk sitting inside another with water, to make scorching even less likely.  After the 20 minutes, place the pot of milk in a cold water bath to lower the temp quickly down to just 110 degrees. 

Heat lamp does double duty. Warms chicks and yogurt.
At this point, we bring in the only other ingrediant needed, active-culture yogurt.  You can use cultured bacteria to make your yogurt, but we had no problem with Plain, Stonyfield Farms Yogurt. Add a couple of tablespoons of yogurt to the milk and stir stir stir.  After a couple minutes, pour the milk into a sanitized container, seal it and keep it in a hot spot for about 8 hours.  We use either a heat lamp or heat pad.  Careful, you want the temp to not dip below 110 but not exceed 120 or the culture will die.  But if everything goes well, you should never need to buy yogurt again, as you can keep using the successive yogurts to seed the next batch.  And it is Gooooooood......

4 comments:

  1. So glad it worked out. I've made yogurt before for a friend and it was fun! I love anything that seems like a science experiment. I hope Sonja is feeling better soon!

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    1. I suspect I shall live, but what started as allergies, has now settled into the back of my throat to make me a walking, coughing terror. Poor, Sean.

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  2. oh I want a hands on lesson in this Sonja!!

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    1. Call me when you want to come over and we can make it together. ♥

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