HOMEMADE YOGURT - CREAMY AND HEALTHY

This is my healthy homemade yogurt. by using a yogurt-maker it would be so easy to prepare. 

Below you will find the simple instructions to prepare, rebuild and maintain, a good and natural yogurt, as well as some little advice on how to avoid common mistakes.The great thing about this yogurt is the easy way to prepare it. you just need five minutes of your time, eight hours of incubation, and probably only few days to make it disappearing from the fridge. you will not be able to resist, I'm quite sure. :)

For years now, I use the same yogurt maker, my old Girmi machine. I have found that it is still on the market, sold at a price that is around 30 euro.

A little side note on the  consume of the electric yogurt maker: 
For eight hours of use, it takes no more than 0.5 kilowatts that in my house correspond to  0,06 euros, a great thing if you think about it.

The yogurt maker is equipped with seven glass jars, very solid, with screw cap made of plastic material. They are really beautiful to look at and can be washed in the dishwasher. If you eat out, take along a jar behind on the glass keeps long the freshness of yogurt and the screw cap allows you to keep it well saved for later. If we wrap the jar in aluminum foil, the yogurt will stay cool longer.

CHOOSING THE RIGHT MILK

Milk is the basis of yogurt. Often we put all the attention on the milk enzymes  and choose the first milk we find.
Personally, I would recommend to use a whole milk. 

The high level of fat inside the whole milk is necessary to feed the enzymes. If we dont reach a certain level of lipids, our yogurt may not came out properly, with the thick consistency that we like so much.

If you still want to try a low-fat milk, will not tell you that you're wrong. But know that the texture will never be a beautiful creamy.

For my personal version of home-made yogurt I chose a UHT milk. 

If you use fresh whole milk, you need to boil it first to make sure that it becomes sterile. This is because any bacteria could interfere with our live enzymes.

We should bring the milk to a temperature of 90 degrees and keep it to 15 minutes. In this way we are going to denature proteins, favoring the formation of a more compact and creamy yogurt. 

Don't forget to bring back our milk at room temperature, before use. 

In order to avoid this boring passage I prefer to use UHT milk which is already sterile.

The type and the brand of milk that we are going to use, will affect the taste of our yogurt in a decisive way. Let me give you an example:
I recently discovered a uht whole milk sold at a very affordable price from my favourite discount market. It is a milk of German origin. This has given my yogurt a very nice taste slightly of cheese and a creamy and perfect consistency. I have elected this milk as my favorite milk to make yogurt.

One day, for some reasons, I had to use another brand of milk. The result was a yogurt always compact but less dense, and also less tasty.
Then I started to use the German milk again, and yogurt came back as I wanted.
All this story was to tell you that, if you are not convinced about the taste of your yogurt, you can make experiments, and try other brands of milk, until  you will find your favorite milk.

CHOOSING THE STARTER  (YOGURT)

As the milk, I recommend you to try different yogurt, even the sub-brands. I started with a yogurt I bought in my discount and it was fine. In order for our milk can be transformed into yogurt, we must provide the bacteria and keep at a constant temperature of around 35 degrees. 

The temperature takes care of the yoghurt bacteria and provides the necessary starting yogurt, what we buy to begin our domestic production.
Unfortunately not all yogurts on the market have the bacteria and not always right on the label shows the name of the bacteria / enzymes. In fact there is more than one type of enzymes, some better than others.

The enzymes wu are looking for are the  Lactobacillus bulgaricus  and  Streptococcus thermophilus .  More information on this can be found on my  dossier dedicated to yogurt and its beneficial  qualities.

For the choice of your starter, I have to be honest, I tried with the yogurt I've found. I came too with some liquid, and then I tried another. With one in particular, bought at my discount store, I found myself so well that I no longer had to buy other starters because I continued to make my yogurt from that ancestor. And it's been over a year since then!

If, by chance, with the yogurt you choose, should pick you out a yogurt too runny or pick you up at all, then try another brand. The important thing is that it is not a sweetened yogurt or light. 

Must be a natural whole yogurt.

If instead, you want to play it safe, use the greek yogurt, Total Fage, just to do some free advertising!

PROCEDURE

1. Take a cup of yogurt and a liter of milk. Both must be at room temperature .
2. Make sure the jars of yogurt are well washed and dried.
3. In each jar put two teaspoons of yogurt. 
4. Pour milk into jars.
5. Stir with a spoon to mix milk and yogurt. Just take a few turn, do not worry though there are small peaces of yogurt. 
6. We place the jars WITHOUT COVER, into the yogurt maker. 
7. We choose a quiet place where the yogurt can stand for 8 hours without being disturbed. I put on the floor under the desk or, if it is night, under the kitchen table. If you've read somewhere that yogurt should never be moved for any reason, trust me it's not true. You can read more about this article on yogurt and vibration. Touch or move the yogurt, not affect the success of our yogurt. You can also remove the cover, check the consistency of the yogurt moving a jar and, if necessary, close and let it work for more time.
8. After 8 hours, unplug it, remove the cover immediately, and, if the yogurt seems nice compact, put the jars in a quiet place to cool. After half an hour close the jars with their cover. When they are at room temperature, you can put it in the fridge. After a couple of hours your yogurt will become more firm and creamy.

REDOING YOGURT
Once you have made ​​your first yogurt, and it came out well you must remember to leave a jar of yogurt for your second production. That would be your new starter.

From this moment and for the future, you will not use more yogurt purchased but one made ​​by you. The jar of homemade yogurt will be your starter as already said. Keep tightly closed in the refrigerator because you will need to redo the yogurt again, again, and again.

Beware doses : If the first time we used a whole jar, now you need just a half (one teaspoon per jar), because our Yogurt is richer in enzymes than the one purchased.

A simple advise to make our yogurt even better: Remove the superficial layer from the starter that is less rich in enzymes and then proceed as above.  

If you follow my instruction you can go on forever making a very good home made yogurt. The only cost for a liter of healthy yogurt, will be that of a liter of UHT milk (69 cents in my supermarket), and electricity, as already seen, is something very minimal. Not bad right? A good, healthy and economic yogurt to taste whenever we want.