After some investigation a few months ago, I found out that I needed to drain the whey off if I wanted Greek style yogurt. I do and I did. This made my seven jars of yogurt reduce to two and a half or three jars.
Now, don't get me wrong this Greek style yogurt is AMAZING and so worth it but resulted in the need to make several batches a week and drain them all. The mess and the work became more than someone who works five days a week could handle.
So while surfing around on Pinterest the other day I ran into some articles about crock pot yogurt and thought that this might be the cure for my homemade yogurt desires. The couple of articles lead me to read several more. No one's way of doing it quite fit what I thought that I wanted to do. So I took some ideas from here and there and decided how I would try this.
My needs:
- I need to have enough yogurt that I can eat it everyday (maybe twice a day since others in my home may want to eat some too)
- I only have to go through the process once
- I also decided that I wanted to take a portion of the yogurt and make yogurt cheese to replace my cream cheese
I stopped by the store to pick up a few things and bought a gallon of skim milk ($2.99 on sale), two cartons of Okios Greek yogurt to use as starters ($2.00).
What I did:
- Poured the whole gallon of milk in the crock pot. I have an AMAZING crock pot that was worth every dime I paid for it...it's very large, the lid locks down, and it has a temperature probe
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| My Amazing Crock Pot |
- I sliced a vanilla bean in half (we bought a package of 50 really good vanilla beans off the net for $25...so this was only about 50 cents) and tossed it into the pot
- Secured the lid down inserted the probe and set the pot to heat to 185
- The timer went off about 3 hours in and I removed the probe, turned off the pot and let it sit...checking every hour or so until the temperature dropped to 120
- At this point I put the two containers of Okios into the pot and mixed it up well
- I put a thick towel under the pot and covered it with two thick towels and went to bed
- In the morning I had a pot of yummy yogurt...there was a LOT of whey in the pot
- I took a strainer basket, put a clean cloth in it, sat it over a very large glass measuring cup, and ladled a couple of ladles full into that for my yogurt cheese...this may need to set for much longer than the yogurt
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| Yogurt Cheese Draining |
- I took a much larger strainer and lined it with a clean cloth, put this over a large pan, and ladled the rest of the yogurt into this basket
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| Yogurt Draining |
- I let both set for about 3 and a half hours at room temperature to drain over their containers to drain
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| Finished Yogurt Cheese...this firmed into cream cheese consistency. |
Lessons that I have learned with Greek yogurt making...always save your whey until you have whisked the yogurt and refrigerated it for awhile. You will need to get it back out and whisk it again. Often you will feel that the yogurt is not thick enough and find that after the temperature changes it is actually too thick. If you find that, you can then add some whey back a couple of tablespoons full at a time until it reaches the thickness that you prefer. They you can place it in your reusable single serving containers for work, school, whatever and the remaining can be eaten at home or used however you like!
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| Yogurt before whisking...you can't see in the pic but there are little vanilla bean specks all through it! I added five little packets of Splenda to the whole batch to take the tartness off...it's not too sweet and not too tart! |
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| Yogurt packaged for my lunches this week. I didn't have as much left over still as I would like! |
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| My left over whey...I put it in the fridge. I have been looking for ideas and am leaning toward making ricotta for the lasagna that I am making for an upcoming party! |
What to do with the left over whey? I don't want to dump it so here is where I am looking for ideas!
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