Hi all! Although I am new to this forum, I see an awful lot of references to boiling milk when making yogurt and I just want to comment. I live on a farm and am fortunate enough to have access to raw milk. I will never drink pasteurized milk. For those of you who have been brainwashed since birth as I was before my farming venture, you may think this is crazy. But Raw Milk is the good stuff. Pasteurized is the bad stuff. Raw milk goes sour and sour milk is great in cooking and baking. Pasteurized milk goes BAD. Pasteurization comes from boiling the milk, or at least heating it above 150 degrees. This kills bacteria in the milk. ALL of it. Including the good bacteria. That's why pasteurized milk goes BAD instead of sour. All the good bacteria that eats the bad bacteria has been killed off! I don't heat my raw milk before adding the culture. Like someone in the forum said somewhere, just add the culture and set it in a warm place overnight. If I had to used pasteurised milk, then I would say you would have to boil it first. Pasteurized milk breeds a ton of nasty bacteria when warm. So boiliing it first to kill that off and then culturing with store bought yogurt and keeping it refrigerated makes more sense to me. Not that I would ever want to do it that way.

LindaC, the first time I made yogurt I used the (very detailed) instructions from Fias Co. Farms. That website tells me: Heating the milk is done for a few reasons: 1. 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. 2. Boiling the milk helps to a smooth thick yogurt. 3. 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.) So, I heat the milk to make yogurt and it works very well for me. Lisa, the dry milk isn't necessary, it just helps make a thicker yogurt, so go for it without it. I use the old pillow case because that's what I had on hand, Grandma always drained fruit for jelly by putting the fruit into a pillowcase and tying the top with a piece of clothesline rope, then hanging it from a nail driven into the beam of the basement so it dripped into a bucket placed below the pillowcase. I just tie it to the back of a chair. Anyway, I keep my old thin pillowcases for jelly and for straining cider so I always have those on hand when I might not have a square of cloth or some cheesecloth. Annie

I LOVE Yogurt..but only strawberry, and blueberry. Vannie Walmarts brand is soo good. I buy the large strawberry. If my doctor told me to eat a container a day I'd choose the large one hehe. I often make my boys yogurt and fruit smoothies they love them and they surely are a tad bit healthier than candy.

I Googled this topic a little over a week ago and there is a list of different places that took polls - like Better Homes and Gardens and several other polls. Fage got the best results on most polls. Since i can't drive any longer I have to wait for my DD to bring some home to me. So far she has only gone to Wal-Mart and they only had Dannon's Oikos. She got me Blueberry, Strawberry and Vanilla and I liked all of them! It's not chalky or too tart as some of the tasters said of different brands. One of the Wal-mart stores had a 4 pack of Wal-Mart brand but she was afraid to buy it. Now that I know someone likes it I'll try it. We have 2 Wal-Mart stores close to us. The closest one has Dannon Oikos Greek Yogurt but the other one just has regular Yoplait. Dr. Oz talked about Greek Yogurt a couple weeks ago and said we should eat one before every meal. Very healthy and it fills you up [so you can't eat much else I would say.] LOL That's a good thing. I've already lost almost 5 lbs.