Making Homemade Greek Yogurt

Posted by Paulette

The leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (the Mormons) have been counseling us for decades to keep a year's supply of food storage. My family has never had that much in store, but I try to follow that admonition. As a result of this, we have some staples on hand in case things are a bit lean due to unforeseen circumstances. 
 This month we've had a dishwasher and then a hot water heater give out on us. The $300 emergency fund we had was enough to fix the dishwasher, but the grocery money for two weeks had to be contributed to paying for a new hot water heater. Most people wouln't think of not grocery shopping for two weeks.
 Some things that we relied on had to change. One of them was buying Greek yogurt. When the last container was used up, I scraped about a tablespoon from it and used it as a starter for this batch.
To make this yogurt I used a crock pot, a coleman cooler, and my blender.

  Begin by filling the blender with 6 cups of warm water.
Add 3 cups instant nonfat milk powder, and blend until smooth.

  Set your crock pot to high, and pour the milk into it. Let it heat until the milk gets to 180 degrees F. The remove the insert from the crock pot and let the milk cool to between 98 and 120 degrees. Mix 1 tablespoon plain yogurt into the warm milk.
 Pour the milk into your container of choice. I reused pickle jars for mine. I also put the lids on, since they would be submersed in water.

 Fill one third of your cooler with hot tap water. It should be about 120 degrees. Place your jars of milk into the water. It should go at least half way up the jars.
 Let sit overnight. I started this about 2pm the day before and then checked them the next day, at 6am. 

As you can see, by this point the yogurt was very well set.

 There was some whey at the top that I pored off, but it was only about a teaspoon. Chill before using.

We use this in our fruit smoothies every morning to add some extra protein. 
I decided I deserved a healthy snack after all of that work. Whew!

Homemade yogurt blueberries and ground flax seed

  The taste of this yogurt is very mild. It's not sour like store bought yogurt. It's naturally sweet.