I ran across a blog article that talked about making homemade yogurt in a crock pot. At first, I wondered “why?” Then it sort of made a wee bit of sense – you can control the ingredients and, more importantly, aren’t tied to that miserly 4 or 6 ounce serving the commercial brands sell you.
Now, not being a fan of plain yogurt, I never thought I’d contemplate making yogurt much. I need some fruit and some sweetness to the product. Realistically, we’re talking about some sugar-free jam, some Splenda and fresh fruit, or something along those lines. Other suggestions I found:
Flavorings such as powdered coffee (2-3 t.), powdered milk drink flavorings (2-3 t.), cocoa, chopped fruit, honey, vanilla extract (1 t.), and various types of extract can be used (try 1 t. to 1 qt. of yogurt) can be used.
The crock pot recipe isn’t hard – you heat some milk up for a couple of hours, add some starter yogurt, cook it some more, then wrap it up and walk away for 8 hours so it can set up. (Find instructions here or Google “crockpot yogurt”). Some of the results reported a very runny yogurt, so apparently the temperature of the milk when you add the starter is important (don’t want to kill off the active cultures) as well as the holding temperature during the setting process.
I might give it a whirl someday when I’ve got nothing else to do. This might be fun for a kid’s science experiment too! Would you waste a half gallon of milk and some yogurt to see if it worked for you?
