Looking up recipes for making my own yogurt, I realized that they were, gasp, pasteurized.
Given that I want to make yogurt from raw milk, it seems crazy to pasteurize it in the making! (Pasteurizing destroys all sorts of good vitamins and things.)
And the idea of pasteurizing your own breast milk,when of course your baby drinks it raw -- what, you want to kill all those amazing antibodies in it??? -- seems crazy.
Therefore, here's the new yogurt recipe for raw milk, which can be used for any sort of milk -- breast, cow, soy. Not rice, though. Apparently it just doesn't work.
Amazingly easy.
Heat milk slowly to only 110 degrees (heat it to 180 and it's pasteurized), stir in a couple tablespoons of yogurt that you already have (must have live, active cultures), then put it in a warm place where it can stay close to that temperature for 8-12 hours (longer for thicker, more sour yogurt). I put it in a slow cooker filled with water heated to 120 degrees, and covered the slow cooker with the towel and left it overnight. In the morning, I heated the water up to 120 again before I left for work. The nanny put the newly made yogurt in the fridge a couple of hours later.
That's it!
If you have a pilot light in your oven, you can also put it in the oven overnight.
I tasted it tonight and it's much sweeter than regular yogurt, a natural dairy sweetness.
Cool!
Next up: learning how to make raw kefir. I don't know if I actually like kefir because I've never actually had it. But apparently it has amazing probiotic activity. So I'm going to order some grains... just as soon as I get around to it, whenever that is... and try my hand at it!
I pulled out an old 1980s yogurt maker. Works perfectly. I don't have breast milk but have used organic fat free milk for yogurt to make organic fat free yogurt that was much cheaper than buying it. I've also strained it for a couple hours in the fridge to make greek yogurt.
ReplyDelete