Crock Pot Yogurt

Lately I've heard of more people making their own yogurt, and I decided to jump on the bandwagon. Collette loves yogurt.  She asks to eat it every day.  She will tell me "Mommy, I very hungry for yogurk." (For some reason, she pronounces it with a "k" sound at the end instead of the "t".) And since we practically live on a dairy farm, I figured making our own yogurt would be virtually free.

I used THIS recipe from one of my favorite crock pot blogs.  I'm not going to lie, the yogurt-making process disturbed me a little bit.  Mostly because after you cook the yogurt on low heat for a few hours, you insulate the crock pot with a beach towel and leave it wrapped, but off, over night.  The idea of leaving milk out that long kinda creeped me out. But LL assured me that's basically how yogurt is made anywhere, so I should just deal with it. :)

The next morning, the first thing Collette did when she came downstairs was try to take the towel off the crock pot and look at her beloved yogurk. I came to investigate, and lo and behold:

We had made yogurt!

Here's the verdict on crock pot yogurt: it isn't as thick as store-bought yogurt.  You can strain it with a coffee filter to thicken it up, which I ended up doing with some of ours.  Also, we always buy fruit flavored, sweetened yogurt, and this recipe is for plain, unsweetened yogurt.  I was trying to decide how to sweeten the yogurt for Collette (I'm not sure just fruit would sweeten it enough to what we are used to) when LL had the great idea to use our home made jam.  It's presweetened, and it's real fruit.  So we picked a batch of strawberry-blueberry-banana jam we had made over the summer and stirred that in.

The result:

One happy yogurk eater!

We actually finished off our home made yogurt today.  I saved some for starter (since you need that for the "live and active cultures"), and I will definitely be making more!