Home Made Yogurt Part One - From Sterilised Milk

I use an Easy-yo Flask for making yogurt even when I am not using their prescribed mixes.  I make my own mix.  However the reason I use the Easy-yo flask is that it does not use electric.  All you have to do is boil a kettle.  You can leave this overnight and it is ready in the morning.  I have about four of the flasks and you should be able to achieve a litre of natural live yogurt from each session.  When you have children at home they will eat you out of house and home but yogurt, especially live yogurt is extremely good for you and yet the supermarkets charge you an arm and a leg.  This is also a cheap way of making home made yogurt.  I paid 95p for 1 litre of pasteurised long life milk.  A sachet of the Easy-yo starter costs about £3 or cheaper if you get a box of them.

Why sterilised milk.  Using a carton of sterilised milk is quicker.  It has already been heat treated.  All you need is the inner flask from the Easy-yo which has been sterilised I use baby sterilising tablets.  Fill it with the 1 litre of sterilised milk and 1 tablespoon of live natural yogurt from the shop.  The yogurt is your starter.  (This time I used a natural Greek Yogurt starter so your produced yogurt should be a Greek style yogurt). Seal the flask with the lid. 

You have to assemble your Easy-yo flask.  This consists of the outer flask, a white ring which is known as the baffle which is popped into the flask half way down and which the inner flask stands on.Then add it to the Easy-yo outer flask, fill up with boiling water to the level required and then pop the lid on put it somewhere safe out of the way where it cannot get locked and then check it in the morning.  You should have a nice thick yogurt but before eating it needs popping in the fridge to cool down.  Sometimes there is a little liquid on the top but this is not harmful and just needs draining off.

The yogurt after being left overnight with the lid just taken off,

This is relatively thick but it will need cooling down in the fridge which should make it thicker.

For making the next batch keep back a couple of tablespoons of yogurt from this batch and use it as your starter for the next batch in exactly the same way.  Every so often refresh the starter by buying a new small pot from the store.

I have been making this yogurt since the kiddies were small.  Another reason for making it myself was to ensure that I had the quantities of yogurt that they were eating made cheaply the little individual cartons were costing an arm and a leg.  You can also use the medium sized jars to portion the yogurt up into lunch time portions with some fruit for the kiddies to take to school or you can use the little polythene mini pudding moulds and lids.  I tend to keep it in the main pot and dish it up as I need it.

Making your own yogurt of course means that you can choose what to serve with it.  When the kiddies were home I used to give them pureed fruit such as mixed fruits, sometimes jam, sometimes tinned fruit like mandarin oranges.  Of course its up to you but if you are worried about what they are eating this is a good way to deal with it.

Yogurt of course can be made into ice cream, leaving plain of flavouring with fresh pureed fruit which will also leave a delightful swirl in the ice cream, used in dips, and used in cooking generally.  So it is well worth making it as it is a very useful ingredient to have in the fridge.

Catch you soon.

Pattypan

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