Judy, I can't find the thread either, but here are the instructions I use to make yogurt. I just made 5 quarts last weekend, I use my dehydrator to keep the milk/yogurt at the required 115F for the required amount of time, but when I started making yogurt, I just used a cooler full of hot water and a towel.

I was out of my last batch of yogurt, which I usually use as a starter, so I picked up some plain Fage yogurt when I was at Elery's last week and used that.

Yogurt

There are many different ways of making yogurt. Here are a few variations:

Easy "Traditional" Yogurt:

This is one of the simplest. You can "double" this recipe. You can use a microwave*, but there is no reason you can't do it on top of the stove. Just be careful not to scorch the milk.

1) Start with 3 1/2 C. of milk in a microwave safe bowl, a 4 C. Pyrex measuring cup is perfect for this.

*Note: I have had a couple people comment that they do not approve of using the microwave for food preparation, especially with milk. If you don't like using the microwave, you can heat the milk on the stove.

2) Add some powdered milk* : Stir in 1/2-1 C. powdered milk (cow, goat or soy) if you're using goat milk or soymilk (*please see the note below about making soy milk yogurt), and 1/4-1/2 C. if you're using cow milk.

Why do you add powdered milk? Do you have to add it?

Adding powdered milk will help make the yogurt thick, like the way it is from the store. In Europe, yogurt tends to be "runny", but in the USA we seem to prefer it thicker, so do add the powdered milk it you want it not to be runny.

I do not add any powdered milk; I have found that the "ABY-2C" yogurt culture from Dairy Connection produced a thick enough curd for my liking.

*Note: Another person did not approve of adding powdered milk because it supplied oxidized cholesterol. If you are worried about this and don't want to add powdered milk, then don't add it, but you will probably want to purchase a culture that produces a thicker curd as opposed to just using purchased yogurt (such as Dannon) to make your yogurt.

3) Heat the milk: Place the milk in the microwave (or on the stove) and bring it to a boil. In my microwave this takes about 8-10 minutes depending on if it's right out of the goat or out of the fridge. Stir the milk occasionally and keep an eye on it, but just before it begins to boil, do not stir it, or it will boil over (as I well know). Remove the milk carefully from the microwave. Let it cool some before you place a thermometer in it, or it will still boil over (as, again, I well know).

Heating the milk is done for a few reasons:

To sterilize/pasteurize the milk so that the yogurt bacteria/culture as a hospitable place to grow in. It is not desirable to also incubate possible "bad" or contaminating bacteria that might be present in the unsterilized milk.
Boiling the milk helps to a smooth thick yogurt.
Boiling the milk also helps stop the whey from separating out quite as much. (The "water" you sometimes find on the top of your yogurt is whey.)

4) Let the milk cool to about 118 - 115°.

5) Add the culture.:

Place a couple of heaping Tbs. of plain "live culture" yogurt from the grocery store (i.e., Dannon, or read the carton's label to see if it's "live culture") other starter culture, in a quart mason jar and stir it until it is smooth. Remove any "skin" from the warm milk (one will have formed as it cooled) and feed it to the dog or chickens. Pour a little of the warm milk into the jar, screw the lid on tight and shake well. Now add the rest of the warm milk, replace the lid and shake well.
OR
I use a DVI yogurt culture with Acidophilus (ABY-2C) that I get from the Dairy Connection. When I use this, I use 1/16 tsp. per 1/2 gallon of milk (2 quarts). Remove any "skin" from the warm milk (one will have formed as it cooled) and feed it to the dog or chickens. Pour the warm milk into the jar, added the DVI culture and shake well.
6) Now it is time to incubate. This is not as complicated as it sounds, and can be done many ways. The key is to hold the milk at 110°-115° undisturbed for 6-8 hours (depending on the culture used). See below for various incubation methods. If your yogurt isn't thick enough in 10 hours, it isn't going to get any thicker; it's just going to get sourer. If it didn't get thick at all something happened to the starter, either it wasn't live to begin with, or somehow it got killed. Don't be discouraged- try again another day. Even if your yogurt didn't "yo" (or "gurt") you can still use the milk in cooking.

Various methods of incubation:

1) Use a commercial yogurt maker.

2) I have heard some put the yogurt in their oven with the light on (the light helps keep the correct temp). I cannot have the light on in my oven without keeping the door open (which lets the heat out), so this method does not work for me.

2) Cooler/water method: Use a small cooler with the lid removed, a larger cooler that will hold a quart jar, or a large pot (6 qt.). Place the cooler or pot in a place where it will be undisturbed. Place the jar with the yogurt milk in the cooler. Now fill the cooler with water that is 120°. Place a couple of fluffy towels over the cooler or pot and leave it undisturbed for about 6-8 hours. To check and see if the yogurt is done, tip the jar slightly and see if the milk flows or stays put. Remember that the yogurt will thicken even more as it cools in the fridge. If you see clear whey when you tilt the jar, the yogurt is as done as it's going to get, but you don't necessarily have to see the whey for the yogurt to be done. (have I confused you yet?)

3) Cooler/heating pad method (I figured this out one day and it works really well): Use a larger cooler. Place the cooler in a place where it will be undisturbed. Place the jar with the yogurt milk in the cooler. Place a heating pad over the jar (loosely). Set the pad on high (my pad needs to be set on high, yours may differ) and place the lid on the cooler. Leave it undisturbed for about 6-8 hours. Please note, that since all heating pads are different, yours may not be best set on high. The first time you use this method, put a thermometer in the cooler to see what the pad is heating the inside of the cooler up to. You want it to be at least 110 degrees and not more than 120 degrees. You may need to turn your pad to medium.

4) Food dehydrator. THis is the method I use. I have a large Excalibur Food Dehydrator and is the "Cadillac" of food dehydrators. It is very large and is perfect for incubating yogurt. I can easily incubate 3-4 2 quart jars at one time in my dehydrator.

I do use powdered milk when I make yogurt, and I make a gallon of milk's worth at a time, it gives me about 5 quarts, so I quadruple the "recipe" amounts given here.

My yogurt is nice and thick, it'll mound up on a spoon.

Annie

Annie, I had another batch of failed yogurt yesterday. I have been making yogurt for years but out of the blue my yogurt began to fail started last summer. I thought it was the heat so I took a break. When I finally decided to make it again I went back to make basic yogurt yet the result was still a hit-and-miss. (I used to make a lot of different varieties). Yesterday, I used Acidophilus because hubby ate the last bit of yogurt in the morning. Made six cups but none of that turned out. (Sigh!)

I used a homemade "incubator" for rising bread dough and making yogurt. Dough still rises fine but yogurt is not doing so well. I am going to throw a heating pad in the oven to see if it will maintain proper temperature for yogurt making. Will use the store bought plain yogurt as culture this time. Keeping my fingers crossed.

Al

Al, I hope your yogurt luck improves. Keeping the yogurt at 115F is harder than it sounds, I think. The cooler method worked pretty well for me, but I did have some failures depending on the weather.

I usually just use the last of my current batch of yogurt as a starter, and it worked well. Eventually, though, I started getting a lot of whey and some very sour yogurt, so I started over again with some plain Fage. I've used Dannon before too, it also worked.

Just don't buy flavored, LOL. I got vanilla once by mistake and I had to make about four batches of yogurt, using each batch as a starter for the next batch, before I got rid of that vanilla flavor!

Annie

Annie, thank you!! Your yogurt is nice and thick. It looks good!

I made yogurt 30 years ago because the yogurt in California just didn't taste like the yogurt we we had in Ohio. I used a styrofoam cooler way back then. I will try the oven if the temp is correct.

Judy

LOL Annie, yea, some of the vanilla containers look like the plain ones. I almost picked up the wrong carton, once. Good thing I spotted it before checking out.

Think the heating pad I use in the incubator is going haywire. I used to be able to just wrap the heating pad (in low setting) around a large glass jar overnight and I always got yogurt the next morning. When I first built the incubator, it worked wonders. I could make more smaller cups in various flavors; easier to keep than one big jar of plain old yogurt. Now, I am lucky if I get some decent, edible yogurt.

I will use a thermometer to test out the heating pad in oven tonight. Hope I will be back to yogurt making business this weekend. Wish me luck!

Al

I'm glad you asked this Judy. Thank you. I've been looking for the same info.
I do have a few questions though if someone can help...
Since I'm the only one in the house that will eat yogurt and I don't have anything but pint sized jars, what amounts would I start with to make just a couple of pints?
Annie, I didn't see the note on using soy milk, did I just miss it? That's what I'd be using, so is there something special about it that I need to know?
Thanks so much!
Cathy

I have been wanting to try making my own yogurt for years, but never had the guts! I always thought you needed fancy yogurt-making machines.

Thanks for the info, Annie! I am printing it out and may try it soon!

Linda

Have been making the homemade yogurt for about 2 months now. We love it. Use it on cereal, mix with nuts and berries, make smoothies.

I use a cooler with the jars wrapped in a laptop puffy quilt. I know there's a better name for this quilt but cant thing of it :)

The temps that you cook the milk to sure does seem to vary though. The recipe I use you cook milk to 180 and then cool it down to 100.

Also my recipe says to make sure you take the yogurt out of the fridg. so it gets warmed up to room temp. so it doesnt get shocked when you put it into the warm milk.

Thanks every one for putting me over the yogurt edge.
Two weeks ago after purchasing granola in a cardboard box I went over the granola edge also.
I was looking for a granola that was close to the granola that you purchase at Costco. Nice and sticky variety. My recipe still needs some work to get even close.

woodenzoo, I left out the soy instructions because I don't like soy and never use it. I'll post them here, and I'd start with the 3 1/2 cups of milk called for in the recipe, that would make a couple of pints. I make it a gallon at a time, we use it a lot. I bake with it, Amanda and the kids like it in smoothies and I eat it with fruit, granola and a drizzle of honey.

Here are the soy instructions:

Soy milk yogurt:

I make soymilk yogurt all the time during the 4-5 months my goats have off from milking each year. I make my own soymilk, which entails cooling the soymilk, so I do not bother with the heating of the milk stage in the recipe above. If I were to make soymilk yogurt from store bought milk, I would probably skip the heating of the milk stage as well, since I make my yogurt using my raw milk method (below).
Soymilk does not contain lactose and without lactose, or some type of carbohydrate sugar to ferment, the yogurt culture will not grow. If you make your own soymilk , you will need to to add some sugar, glucose or sucrose to your soymilk. Do not use honey, because honey will impede the yogurt bacteria. If you are using store-bought milk, it may already have enough sugar/sweetening in it.
If you are making soymilk yogurt you may also have to add some other sort of thickening agent. You may not want to use gelatin, because that is made from animals. I use agar powder. You need to dissolve the agar in some water and then bring it to a boil before you use it. For 2 quarts of yogurt (3 1/2 cups of milk), I use 1 tsp. agar in 1/2 cup water. I bring to a boil in the microwave. Keep a close eye on it because it WILL boil over quite quickly and make a big mess. Please note soy milk yogurt is not exactly like animal milk yogurt.

Annie

I am really lazy when it comes to making yogurt.
I use all powdered milk. Mix per package direction for one quart, but I cut the water back by about 1/2 cup.
Heat in the microwave to 115 degrees. Add a couple of tablespoons of last batch (or storebought if someone eats the last bit). I pour the milk into a quart canning jar, put on a plastic lid and place is a tall stockpot. Fill the stockpot with hot tap water (about 130 deg.) to the neck of the jar.
Put the lid on the pot and stick the whole thing in the oven with just the light on.

Go to bed. Get up, have yogurt.

It sits there anywhere from 6 to 10 hours. If not thick enough, I just leave it a little longer.

It's on my "to do" list for this evening!

Deanna

Bumblebeez posted her method for making yogurt on the new or newly discovered thread, about halfway down. That may be the one you are thinking of, but you sure have some good ones here!

I use 900 ml 1% milk in a tall glass container heated to 180 degrees in the microwave and then cooled to 110 degrees. I add 3T Dannon mixed in with a wire whisk then I set it in a large drink thermos filled with hot (120 degree) tap water up to the level of the milk in the glass container. This I put on the forced air heat register, or in summer, in a corner where nobody will disturb it. It "yoges" in about 6 hours to a nice, not too tart, flavor and consistency. 8 or 9 hours makes a tarter product but is still good. I don't use the same batch for starter because I don't make yoghurt often enough. I always start with fresh Dannon. And it helps if the milk is freshly opened, not from a bottle that's been open in the fridge for a few days. And the utensils must be super clean. This method has failed me only if the thermos is moved during the "yoge-ing" or the milk wasn't fresh.