Sunday, January 30, 2011

Yogotherm Yogurt

 


For my first venture with making yogurt in the Yogotherm, I decided to go with whole milk yogurt, primarily to give my 10 month old son. This would be his first yogurt. It was a success! I was a little nervous about having the yogurt set properly in the Yogotherm, but it worked beautifully. I used the Y4 yogurt culture which is described as tangy, but since I used 2 quarts of whole milk to make the yogurt, I found it fairly mild. I strained some and made greek style yogurt which we ate with honey for dessert one night.


I have successfully made yogurt in an electric yogurt maker, but it makes yogurt in individual containers, which I thought might be larger than the baby would eat. Turns out, he can pack away the yogurt:

 


 



2 quarts of yogurt is a lot of yogurt. I took advantage of the other recipes in the yogurt section and make the yogurt muffins and the yogurt dressing. The muffins were good, but I only had giant raisins and they were not a good choice. I think I would actually like the muffins better without any fruit in them and maybe a little cinnamon. They didn't keep very well and were stale before we ate them all.

 


I made the dressing with dill instead of chives and parsley and it was tasty. I definitely liked having beets on the salad because the yogurt dressing is a little tart.

 



When I've made yogurt previously, I made vanilla yogurt. I started with 2% milk (my yogurt maker makes seven 6 ounce containers of yogurt so I used 42 ounces of milk) and I added 1 teaspoon of vanilla and 2-4 tablespoons of sugar, depending on my mood. The dehydrated yogurt culture at the local store is pretty tart.

Recipes from Ricki's Dairy Kit

Yogurt Muffins
1 cup yogurt
1/2 cup sugar
2 eggs, beaten
1 cup raisins
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon cream of tartar
1 1/2 cups flour
1/4 vegetable oil
pinch of salt

Mix until lumpy. Bake at 400 degrees for 20-25 minutes. Makes 12 muffins.



Yogurt Salad Dressing
1 cup yogurt
2 Tablespoons white vinegar
1 1/2 Tablespoons lemon juice
1/8 teaspoon pepper
2 Tablespoons chopped fresh dill
salt

Combine all the ingredients and mix well. Refrigerate.

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3 comments:

Sarah said...

Why were you nervous about having the yogurt set properly in the Yogotherm?

Describe this in more detail: "I strained some and made greek style yogurt which we ate with honey for dessert one night." Do you mean you made yogurt cheese (page 27 in the Gourmet Home Dairy Kit booklet)?

I wonder if the yogurt muffins would freeze well, hence avoiding that whole staleness bummer.

Do you know what bacteria are in the dehydrated yogurt culture available at your local granola crunchy store? I wish I had a local granola crunchy store that sold yogurt cultures. I want the full array of possible yogurt cultures at my disposal.

I'm totally going to try the yogurt salad dressing.

Do you think you're going to keep up with making your own yogurt for the wee bairn regularly? At the rate my wee bairn goes through yogurt I'd have to make it about once a week. I'd like to keep up with it, but I lack confidence in my ability to consistently find the time.

Rebecca said...

The other yogurt maker I have is electric and so it maintains the heat by actually warming the culture until you turn it off. I wasn't sure how it would work without the heat source.

I did make yogurt cheese, but it was more like greek yogurt in that it wasn't super think, but it was thicker than the non strained yogurt.

I am out of the other culture now. I'll get some more the next time I go. I also made some yogurt with another culture and it was super sweet. I think that the whole milk makes it sweeter too.

Dexter seems to have some sensitivity to the yogurt (he spits up after he eats it) and so I'm going to hold off giving him more for now. I'll try again in another month.

It's possible that freezing the muffins would have worked, but they weren't really worth making again. Maybe with other flavorings, it would be better, but we didn't love them.

Sarah said...

I'm definitely looking into making yogurt again but with other cultures. I have to try yogurt cheese.

Poor Dexter! We didn't start Zoe on yogurt until 9 or 10 months. Thankfully she hasn't had any negative side effects. We just mix it in with her cereal and banana in the morning. Now her breakfast consists of:
1 whole banana, mashed
1/2 C Earth's Best Organic Multigrain Cereal
2/3 C yogurt
She usually eats it as fast as we can spoon it into her mouth.

Thanks for the heads up on the muffins. I won't bother with that recipe.