Bare ground and dark clouds of January...
The drive to Coco's house this morning was absolutely beautiful! Yesterday it was unseasonably warm (52 degrees!) and today it was a bit cooler (around 30 degrees) and quite cloudy. The clouds were so dark and low, touching the hills in some places. It was so pretty that I felt compelled to stop my car on a 55 mph road (no, there was nobody behind me) to take some pictures :)
Last night, in addition to my chocolate chip cookies, I also attempted to make yogurt for the first time. I went to Laura's house to milk her cow, Clover, on Friday night, and had a gallon of fresh, creamy, delicious milk to play with. Laura gave me some starter cultures for making yogurt, but since I knew that you can also use already made yogurt as a starter culture, I decided to experiment a little bit. I attempted 2 batches of yogurt, one with Laura's culture, and one using 1/4 cup plain yogurt from Wegman's.
Making yogurt is really REALLY easy (that is, if you have a way to keep the yogurt around 90-100 degrees for 6-12 hours to let the good bacteria work their wonders). Each recipe used a quart of milk (equivalent to 4 cups!), and the first step is to heat up the milk to 185 degrees Fahrenheit (I bought a candy thermometer at Wegman's to help me with this) and then take the milk off the stove and let it cool to 110 degrees. When it reached 110 degrees, I separated out the milk into two different containers, each containing 4 cups. To one container, I added a packet of Laura's culture, and to the other, I added 1/4 cup plain yogurt. I have been reading things online about how to make yogurt, and people say you can just insulate a pot with towels and stick it in a warm oven overnight and that should do the trick, so I decided to try this technique with the milk + Laura's culture mixture. The mixture was in the pot I used to heat up the milk, so I wrapped it up in 2 bath towels and put it in the warm oven. I then decided to try to minimize the amount of warm air that would escape from the oven by covering the burners and vents with aluminum foil (I made sure the oven was turned OFF and UNPLUGGED before doing these things-you can't really do this with an electric oven). The other mixture (yogurt + heated & cooled milk) went into my crock pot. I turned the dial to the "warm" setting, hoping that it wouldn't be too warm, and covered the top with 2 kitchen towels.
After I did all of this, I was pretty tired of cooking (I had already made dozens of chocolate chip cookies!) so I decided to go read/go to bed. When I woke up in the morning, I was really excited to see how my yogurt was doing......
...unfortunately, both yogurts failed! I kind of expected neither to work because I didn't have a way to keep the yogurt at a consistent 90-100 degree temperature for such a long time (this temperature is crucial for the bacteria to turn the milk into yogurt). The oven/towel method ended up cooling off too much (thus the temperature was too cool for the bacteria), and thus I was left with a soupy mixture that smelled and tasted like yogurt but was the consistency of a drinkable yogurt (I did put this in my refrigerator to save for possible smoothies), and the crock pot's "warm" setting was WAY too warm, so although the yogurt was the perfect consistency, it burned :(
Anyway, this was a really valuable learning experience, and i now know that i really need to find a way to keep the yogurt at the correct temperature. This is the KEY thing you need in making yogurt. When I figure this out, I will try again... hopefully soon!
