Raw Milk Yogurt Is Yummy!

I finally did it. I pulled out Nourishing Traditions, found the raw milk yogurt recipe, and made it.

(This post is part of Healthy Home Economist’s Monday Mania.)

I hadn’t planned on it. We’d been going along, drinking raw milk kefir green smoothies for breakfast as part of our healthy diet regimen, with seeming contentment all around.

Then, suddenly Benjamin decided he didn’t like the smoothies. I started making his smoothie separately, with only a little kefir and mostly plain raw milk. He ate them much more readily, but inevitably would complain of a tummy ache a little while later.

I can’t say for sure without raw goat milk to compare, but I wonder if he is one of those (like me) who has a hard time digesting uncultured cow milk, even raw, and would do better with goat milk.

Anyway.

I had to do something. And I knew that yogurt is not as sour as kefir. What if I made his smoothies with yogurt instead? So I found the page with the homemade yogurt recipes and got going.

For some reason, I had it in my head that the process would take a lot longer, even though I knew that to prepare raw yogurt you only heated the milk to around 110 degrees F.

I don’t have a double boiler, so I used a waterless cookware pan. Since it has several layers, I figure there was less of a chance of the milk on the bottom of the pan getting overheated.

Before I knew it, the quart of milk was at 110. After removing two tablespoons of the warm milk, I let Benjamin stir in a tablespoon of Stonyfield Farm plain yogurt. Then, I poured it into a jar, and mixed in two more tablespoons of the prepared yogurt.

Incubating the milk was a no-brainer. Temperatures have soared as high as 108 here the past few weeks, so all I had to do was set the jar outside in a shady area (I figured to set a glass jar in the sun would cause a greenhouse effect that would overcook the mixture).

This was late morning. The yogurt was ready around supper time.

The verdict? Benjamin had a yogurt smoothie for breakfast the next morning. He sucked it down, and had no physical complaints.

Raw yogurt is easy to make (assuming you have a source of raw milk), full of probiotics, easier on the tastebuds than kefir, and a great way to pass a few minutes on a too-hot-to-go-outside day.