Today's Real Food Friday Feast recipe is... Home-made yogurt! But why would anyone want to make their own yogurt when the shelves at the grocery store are lined with so many different yogurt options? Well, you know what I'm going to say to that, don't you? Anything that is in a sealed package, on the shelf of a grocery store, is processed food and processed food isn't actually REAL food. In case you aren't sure why, read this post.
I really feel for people who stock up on yogurt on a weekly basis and dutifully eat it by the litre, thinking that they are doing wonders for their digestive system. The reality is that store bought yogurt has about the same nutritional value as a store bought caramel-toffee dessert: and that would be zero. The reason for this is that the yogurt is fermented for a very short period of time, sometimes as little as an hour, in order to turn out more yogurt at a time, and make more money (you didn't actually think they were bothered with making it healthy for you, did you?!) To make it worse, thickening agents are added to the yogurt BECAUSE they don't ferment for long enough, and fermentation is usually the process that thickens it.
So, that yogurt you are eating, actually has very little, if any, probiotics (read about some of the benefits of probiotics in this post) in it and it also has hidden thickening agents that you should really not be eating. To make it worse, most yogurt has so much added sugar that it really does have a similar calorie count to a caramel-toffee dessert! If you are feeding that to your kids, you are not doing them any favours, I promise you. Unfortunately yogurt has been labelled a health food and that means people buy it by the truckload, AND feed it to their kids because it's a convenient, easy, "healthy" snack.
Make a note of this: generally, anything that is easy and convenient, is NOT going to be good for you. It'll probably add a few more minutes to your day. But, those minutes added to your day, can ultimately be subtracted from your life in total, whether it leads to time spent in a doctor's room, or a hospital bed, or worse.
That is why I blog:) And actually, home-made yogurt is SO easy, it'll take you the amount of time you would have taken to get to the store and back, to actually make it and all it will cost you is the price of 1 litre of milk to make 1 litre of yogurt.
Something to bear in mind is that, if you are going to make your own yogurt, it would be a lot more beneficial to use a good quality milk. If you're not sure why, then read this post to understand why full cream, raw milk is the BEST milk for you. If you can't find raw, the next best alternative is Woolies organic full cream milk although, even that is heat-treated and pasteurised.
A pot
A ceramic or glass dish with a lid
A whisk
1 litre of milk
1/2 cup yogurt (try to get a decent yogurt as a starter. Woolies sells an organic yogurt. You'll only need to buy it once if you are going to be making yogurt often)
Thermometre
Method:
- Turn your oven on to 50° celsius. (this is to create a nice warm environment for the bacteria to thrive in)
- Place the pot on the stove on medium heat so that the milk won't burn at the bottom of the pot. (On my stove this is about a 4)
- Pour the milk into the pot, leaving the lid off (to avoid condensation dripping back into the milk)
- The milk must gently come to a boil (keep an eye on it because it happens quite suddenly and I've been caught unawares a few time!)
- Remove the pot of milk from the stove, cover with a dishcloth and leave to cool
- Every few minutes test the temperature of the milk until it reaches about 40° celsius. (A food thermometre is best here but I STILL don't have one so I just use my digital one that I usually use when one of us is sick! It doesn't go above about 43° celsius but that's fine because you only need it to reach 40°!)
- When the thermometre reads 40° celsius, pour the milk into your ceramic dish
- Turn OFF your oven (you don't want to nuke the little bacteria;)
- Add the 1/2 cup yogurt and mix it in with a whisk (a fork will do if you don't have one!)
- Place the lid on the ceramic dish and stick the dish in the oven
- Leave for 24 hours
- After 24 hours, place the yogurt into a container and store it in the fridge. It will last for about a week or two depending on how fast you eat it.
I usually do this in the morning and then I leave it in my oven overnight and take it out the next morning. If you make some yogurt and suddenly remember you need to roast a chicken in the oven, firstly, DON'T FORGET TO TAKE YOUR YOGURT OUT before turning your oven back on and secondly, it will be fine if you take it out. Your oven will cool down within an hour of you turning it off anyway. As long as it has a bit of heat to kickstart the process, it will still ferment just fine. Put your dish on top of the oven and it will still probably feel a bit of heat from the chicken roasting anyway. Once you've roasted your chicken, let the oven cool a bit before putting your yogurt back into the oven. I learnt this the hard way when I managed to kill all the little bacteria in my yogurt by putting it back into a TOO hot oven!
That's it! Really simple and easy and yummy! You can add fruit, or honey, as you eat it, if the plain yogurt is too sour for you. I really recommend getting your kids, and YOU, accustomed to eating it plain if NOT with fruit or honey. Try to avoid adding sugar to food as it really takes away from the nutritional value. You'll find, with raw, full cream milk, it is deliciously creamy and tasty!
Have a super weekend!
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