I Am Officially Weird

homemade yogurt

I made my own yogurt. I know. I don't even shave my legs either. But I've got white blond hair. And I'm not really a hippie. I promise. Mostly.

Whatever. I guess I'm about 60% hippie. So think whatever you like.

straining homemade yogurt

It only takes 1/2 cup of any yogurt with live cultures, 1/2 gallon of milk and a crock pot.

Plus time, and jars, and a cloth covered strainer, but who doesn't have those?  All in all it takes 13-21 hours.  But the most labor intensive part is straining out the whey.  The more whey I get out, the thicker the yogurt.  The difference in time is whether or not I let the yogurt set up one more time in the fridge.

Most of the time is spent in the milk getting warm, cooling off, and . . . well, turning into yogurt.

berries in yogurt

We don't drink a lot of milk.  We don't eat enough greens to get our calcium that way either. So we tend to eat yogurt a few times a week, as shown in someone's lovely photo above. Don't berries just make you happy?  Berries make my kids happy enough to eat plain yogurt.

My pediatrician once scared the daylights out of me by saying that giving my kids the yogurt I bought back then is about as healthy as giving them a candy bar.  I thought she was bonkers, until I checked.  Milk has natural sugars of course, about 7 grams a cup.  Yogurt naturally has around 13.  But, last time I checked those tiny fancy yogurts had 24 grams of sugar.  Most candy bars have between 19 and 32 grams.

"Nutritionists recommend picking yogurts with no more than 30 grams of sugar per six-ounce serving. 'Thirty grams is where we can separate the decent stuff from the pure garbage,' says Jayne Hurley, a senior nutritionist at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nonprofit health advocacy group in Washington, D.C." -Virginia Sole-Smith

 My pediatrician told me-five years ago-to just make my own and make my kids eat it plain with fruit.

Hahahahaha!

Oh.  Well, that's how I felt five years ago.  But we've taken our own slow journey to get to this point.  We probably get natural sugars from the fruit and our homemade granola this way.  But we also get vitamins and fiber.  For about a year we've been eating it like the picture above along with granola.  Minus the drizzle of honey.

So that makes it worth the trouble to me.

chobani yogurt

Besides.  Have you seen how much one of these things runs?
Here is the RECIPE
And here is the POST I found it with
I also googled the process because I accidently froze my 1/2 cup of starter yogurt.  Oops.

So.  Where are you on your [perhaps non-existent] yogurt journey?

photo 2 credit
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