How to Make Yogurt at Home
(Page 3 of 5)
March/April 1980
By V.B. Ramig
The trick is to keep your yogurt hatchery warm and undisturbed for a few hours, and people have devised ingenious ways to accomplish this. Some folks with gas-powered stoves will place their yogurt kettle in the oven and let the pilot light keep it warm. Others with electric stoves will put the culture container in the oven anyway, but heat the batch with an electric light bulb on an extension cord, or by replacing the appliance's small inside light with a 100-watt bulb. Then again, other people place their incubating yogurt in an airtight pressure cooker and set the pot at an experimentally determined appropriate distance from a woodstove or other constant source of warmth. On a sunny day, you can even drape your yogurt container with black material, stick the whole thing outside, and make yogurt with solar power! (I just keep the water bath above 100 degrees by occasionally substituting boiling water for some of the cooled liquid.
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THE PERFECT YOGURT MAKER
We've found our own quality — and quantity — yogurt maker in a fish tank! All we did was buy a standard 50-watt tropical fish aquarium heater (for approximately $5) from a local variety store. We then cut a wooden 1-by-1-inch board to fit snugly in the "middle top" of our big kitchen canner, and fastened the water warmer securely to this cross brace. Next, we filled the canner with a 115-degree bath, and six pint jars of inoculated milk, plugged in the heater (we had to fiddle with the thermostat dial a little to figure out that perfect 110-to-115-degree setting), put the lid on the canner, covered the kettle with a thick blanket, and left the whole thing alone for a few hours.
The result? Our aquarium-heater-controlled incubation chamber kept the water bath and the growing culture at a constant temperature, and we got quarts of thick, creamy yogurt. And we've made "fishy yogurt" ever since, because our technique works every time.
After the yogurt has had time to start coagulating, tip a jar gently to see how firm or liquidy it is. Then, once the yogurt reaches your desired thickness (could take up to 12 hours or so), refrigerate the finished yogurt. The refrigerated culture will continue to thicken and gradually, but at a much slower rate than warm yogurt will. Yogurt is "thermophilic," meaning it ferments well at warm temperatures.
CHAIN YOGURTING
You don't have to buy more starter to make your second — and succeeding — batches of yogurt. Just save a tablespoon or two from one culture to inoculate the next batch of milk. You should, however, start the next round within two to five days, or (if you can't meet the deadline) simply freeze some fresh yogurt and thaw the iced culture when you're ready to brew again.
The first batch from your original starter will firm up in anywhere from four to twelve hours (most likely in around six to eight hours), but subsequent rounds will set ever more rapidly — and taste ever more tangy — until you finally have to give up on that "chain" and buy yourself some new starter.
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