Making yogurt

Milk (unpasteurized)

Powdered milk, yogurt (to use as starter)

"Cooking" for 8 hours

Voila!

I really like yogurt and miss good Yoplait, Yami, Tillamook, and Darigold products here in Tanzania.  Plain, vanilla, strawberry, lemon, huckleberry - pretty much all flavors are good.  When friends here started making their own yogurt from scratch, I imagined it would be a lot of work and didn't even bother asking about the process.  But when I found out it takes about 5 minutes of work and eight hours of nothing, well, I gave it a go!

I can buy milk in town fairly cheaply, so that is where my yogurt journey starts.  I take my own container to put it in, buy 1.5 liters, and then boil it when I'm ready to make the yogurt.  After bringing it to a boil, I let it simmer away for a few minutes, then turn off the stove and put a lit on the pot and let it sit a while.  When it's cool enough to dip my finger in it for five seconds, I pull the skin off the top (milk forms a nasty skin when heated, as anyone who has ever made pudding or cream of chicken soup knows), mix in a bit of powdered milk and some yogurt leftover from my last batch, whisk it all up, and put it in a stay-warm pot.  The leftover yogurt is necessary for the cultures it contains - you have to have bacteria to grow the next batch!  Then I wrap the pot up in towels to help it stay warm, look at the clock and check back with my yogurt in about eight hours.

I take the lid off, and there it is - yogurt!  At this point it is still a bit nasty looking, but I pour off the water whey to make it thicker, whisk it up, put it in a Tupperware, and after a few hours in the fridge, it looks like stuff you could get at a store.  Homemade yogurt, folks!