childbearing hipster: I Made You This Myself

Add yogurt to the list of things I can now make myself, as from-scratch as a person without a cow can muster.

There is something incredibly gratifying about making something you can buy just as easily if not more so. It's almost inevitably cheaper, for one thing, freeing up budget for stuff that's way more fun than making stuff from scratch. It's almost inevitably healthier, for another.

But not everything is really worth making from scratch all the time, not for everyone. I myself would not dream of buying boxed macaroni and cheese, but some people will never let go of that. On the other hand, despite the fact that I'm perfectly capable of making awesome rice pilaf, there will always be a box or ten of Rice-a-Roni in my pantry and I will always prefer it to homemade, although if I added MSG to my own, I'd probably change my mind.

Some things are only easy to make if you have a specialized piece of equipment: fancier pastas, maybe, although I don't know this for sure as I've never tried out the specialized piece of equipment in question, a hand-cranked pasta machine I bought at an estate sale last year. That's a summer project, I hope, or I'm going to start feeling bad about that pasta machine whether it was five bucks or not.

Some things aren't as economical in the short term to make the experiment worth trying. This recipe for mineral makeup, for example. Love me some mineral makeup, for sure, but I don't go through it very fast. Spending a ton of money up front, and not being able to buy the ingredients locally, makes a from-scratch experiment less attractive. This might be one for trying if I can get some other mineral makeup fans on board to share the cost of the raw materials, because it would definitely be a long term savings.

Anyhoo, the idea of making yogurt dates back to when Molly started eating it, and reared its head again a couple years ago when I started relying on my crock pot more and wondering if that could double as a yogurt maker, and then this article reminded me that I'd never tried (and also inspired me to add "make bagels" to my list of things to try).

A quick Google turned into a long sift through recipes that might as well have all been for totally different things, but this one, the simplest one I found, seemed like a safe place to start. I halved it to make only one quart at a time, and I used Brown Cow plain yogurt as a starter--of the few small containers of plain yogurt available at my grocery store, it had the most live cultures.

I started the process late in the morning yesterday, so it ended up culturing for about 18 hours (I admit, I tasted it right before I went to bed and it seemed way too mild, so I wrapped it back up in its towel and left it alone). This morning it was pretty darn good--I might even let it go a little longer next time to see if I can get it a bit more tart. The texture is thick and creamy, almost drinkable but still totally spoonable. I'm going to strain a little of it to see what happens, whether it's worth it to achieve thick Greek-style excellence.

The kids had some for breakfast, drizzled with farmer's market honey and deemed it "as good as the kind from the store", which, considering that yogurt is something I don't skimp on, is high praise.