Homemade Yogurt

Making yogurt sounded like an easy project, and since I don’t even like yogurt, I wouldn’t have to worry much about the outcome. My wife consumes it at a pretty steady pace, so this could be a money-saving project with some direct benefit for her. Sometimes I think she questions the whole rudimentarian experiment, and I’m eager to demonstrate its value. Recent scene in the grocery store:

Her: Want some bagels?
Me: Yes… but… I’m trying not to buy what I can make.
Her: OK. (She fills a bag with bagels she likes.)
Me: You could buy an extra and I could take one of yours.
Her: No, you make bagels.

There are also moments, like when I’m talking about making a wooden clock mechanism instead of remodeling the bathroom we’ve been planning for a couple months, when I realize she deserves some sort of consolation prize for putting up with all of it. So, the yogurt would be a small peace offering.

It came out ahead on my assessment of DIY viability:
Quality: + Likely to be as good or better than mass-produced
Cost: + Despite the initial cost for a new food thermometer, should save money in the long run
Time: – Somewhat more time-consuming than buying it at the store
Satisfaction: + A little. How hard can it be to assist milk in spoiling?

The simple ingredients

I used the comprehensive instructions from this page, written by a Ph.D. Professor of Biology and Chemistry. Essentially, you scald the milk up to about 185 degrees, cool to 120 degrees, inoculate with a small amount of yogurt culture (I used store-bought yogurt), and allow the mixture to sit at a consistent temperature for about 4 hours.

The result: failure.

My hours of effort yielded a big batch of sour milk soup. I don’t blame the instructions, which were excellent. I believe the issue was cheapness. My newly-purchased $10 food thermometer gave wildly diverse readings, making it tough to determine when the milk had reached critical temperature points. More importantly, I was sabotaged by my own miserly thermostat settings. We keep the house at a thrifty 60 degrees during the day, and although I packed the milk/yogurt slurry in a cooler wrapped in towels, and put it in the furnace room (note: a deviation from the Professor’s method of warm-water immersion), the ambient chill made it difficult to keep the mixture warm enough for the culture to grow.

I suspect this may be a reason that I associate yogurt with warm-weather cultures. I’m guessing the technological equivalent for cold climates is cheese production.

I was unprepared for how annoyed I felt over this setback. I had assumed that this would be an unfuckupable slam-dunk of a project. Between babysitting the milk as it heated, and checking temperatures again regularly as it cooled, the process had consumed significantly more time than I’d expected, and almost against my will, I became heavily invested in the results. Despite the fact that I wasn’t even going to eat the completed product, I gritted my teeth as I poured the result of a morning’s work down the drain, uttering curses, being a difficult and unpleasant person, and vowing never to try making yogurt again.

Until summer, that is, when our penny-pinching use of the A/C and balmy indoor temperatures should make this an easy win.