homemade yogurt

A friend of ours gave us some of her homemade yogurt the other day. It was so good I decided it was time to go ahead and try it myself. I've been thinking of it for a while now. The kids go through Yoplait flavored yogurts really quickly, but I hate that one of the first ingredients is high fructose corn syrup. There are the natural brands without it, but they get pricey. I was really pleased that the kids were liking Ghena's homemade yogurt so I thought I'd try it.

(Now I have to confess that part of why they were devouring the yogurt is because we were also drizzling it with homemade chocolate sauce. But even that had natural ingredients in it.)

I asked Ghena how she made her yogurt. Part of why it's so yummy is that it has either whole or 2% milk. I decided that I wanted to go the nonfat route to make it easier for me with my quest to lose 5 pounds, and that way I could use nonfat milk powder too, to make it really affordable. There are instructions all over the internet on how to do it, so you can check out some simple ones here. The only difference was the addition of a box of unflavored gelatin. And I used the oven method which I don't think I will do again. My yogurt is runny and I think it's party due to the fat content and partly due to my incubation method.

I will be doing it again soon...well, after we eat this first batch. I'll let you know how it goes using the cooler incubation method. That's the one Ghena uses. And her stuff is AWESOME!

It's also great because you can use whatever you want as sweetener. I used turbinado last time, and I think I could have used more. (I think I used about 1/2 cup.) You could easily use honey or molasses or just table sugar. But you can control what goes in there. And I also used some of Lorrie's homemade vanilla extract. YUM!