Make your own yogurt
It is strange that we in Western nations have preserved milk as cheese for thousands of years, but only adopted yogurt in the late 20th century. Even now, people rarely use yogurt for commonly made sweet with sugar and chemicals and sold as a health food.
Yogurt is simply milk whose lactose has been already digested by bacteria and changed to lactic acid, so it can be enjoyed by many lactose-intolerant people. It is rich in protein, calcium, riboflavin and Vitamins B6 and B12, and is thought to be good for indigestion and yeast infections. And while most people buy it at the store, it can easily be made at home.
The easiest way to make your own yogurt is to simply buy some natural, live-culture yogurt as a starter. Put 500 ml of milk in a pot on the stove, and turn the heat on very low. Don’t let the milk come close to boiling – monitor it with a clean candy thermometer. Bring the temperature up to around 70 degrees centigrade, and then let it cool to around 40.
Then scoop in about 200 ml of natural, organic, live-culture yogurt as your starter and mix well. You could stop here and get a runny batch, but I like to mix in a few scoops of powdered milk to thicken it.
Put the mixture into a plastic bowl, cover it and let it sit in the closet overnight – we put it with our towels over our water heater – and in the morning, you have yogurt. It will keep for a couple of days at room temperature or a couple more in the fridge.
It takes some yogurt to make yogurt, but you multiply your investment with each batch, and since the bacteria are always multiplying, you have a constantly regenerating supply.
If you like your yogurt sweet, you can add fresh apples, pears, raspberries, blackberries — whatever grows around your home — or mix it with juice to make a yogurt drink. But sour yogurt is also good, and has many uses – it makes a healthier salad dressing then oil, a healthier sandwich spread than butter or a healthier soup thickener then cream.
Finally, making and preserving your own foods can be a fun activity for kids, and introduces them to the idea that food can be made and not just bought. It also costs about one-fourth as much as buying yogurt from the store every time. It may seem like a little thing, but a more self-reliant life is made of hundreds of such small steps.
