How to Make Homemade Yogurt Thick and Creamy

Ever wonder why your homemade yogurt is watery, thin, lumpy, stringy, or not "setting" right? Well I don't know either. I do know how to fix it, though.

Some people use pectin to get that coveted mayonnaise-like texture; my BF claims that his sister heats the milk to "just the right temperature" and that's what makes it thick and creamy. I say.... those things sound like a lot of work.

When yogurt is thick and watery, it means there is too much whey. Greek yogurt is just normal yogurt with the extra whey strained out. The technique I use makes a yogurt "cheese" by straining out the whey, and then adds some watery yogurt back in to get the right texture.

Hanging the yogurt.

First, line a mixing bowl with cheesecloth or some other thin cloth. I used a clean napkin. Then gather up the corners and use a rubber band or hair tie to make a "bag". Suspend the bag above a bowl to catch all of the extra whey.

Whey is awesome stuff... you can soak flour with it, put it on your garden plants, or even drink it like lemonade. It is also used in lacto-fermented condiments... like my favored Ginger Carrots.

Anyhow, strain out as much whey as you want. I was busy all day and just let mine drain to the point of being yogurt cheese. Just don't let it get dry and crusty.... eeew.

Mixing in some watery yogurt.

And that's about it! I mixed my yogurt cheese and watery yogurt with a fork, but for best consistency use a whip or Kitchen Aid. Don't be lazy like me. Then, for best results, add maple syrup or pureed fruit or some kind of sweetener. BEST EVER. Plus, you can serve it to guests without being embarrassed or trying to explain that it's "healthy", hence the ugliness.

Let me know how your yogurt turns out!

Vinegar

So I FINALLY got around to doing something with my root beer 'mushroom'. Loosely following some guidelines in an old 70's food preservation book, I put the mushroom in some of my leftover strawberry wine. This is the pre-wine, post-root beer picture.

I think it looks like cow afterbirth.

 Kind of gross, but really no different than a kombucha scoby.
I ended up putting the wine and mushroom in a glass bottle and covering it with a napkin to let bacteria in and out. It's supposed to stay like that for a week, then....??? I don't know. I suppose I'll compare it to apple cider vinegar or red wine vinegar. This is what it looks like now.

In the meantime, I think I have made the most delicious batch of kombucha since I started making it. I purchased some blueberry/pomegranate/acai green tea at Krogers several weeks ago, and used that in place of my usual plain green tea (my normal recipe is 4 bags black, 4 bags green). The resulting tea smelled FANTASTASTIC! It just got done fermenting today, so I threw a handful of frozen berries in the jar and put it in the fridge. I didn't drink any due to what might have been a 24-hour flu bug (no puking, but I didn't want to take any chances). It will taste better when it's chilled, anyway.

Vinegar Mother

My root beer grew a mushroom! This summer I made some black raspberry root beer and had the brilliant idea of corking it. Actually I was out of crown caps, but that is beside the point. I put the extra in some wine bottles, corked them, and stuck them in a cooler to carbonate. A few days later the corks had blown off. I left the open bottles in the cooler and sort of forgot about them. Today, several months later, I was cleaning my studio and found the cooler. The root beer had fermented, probably to the point of being decently alcoholic. Or at least it smelled that way. I dumped one of the bottles in the grass, and lo and behold two 'mushrooms' came out! I got really excited and went to check the other bottle. Sure enough, that one had a mushroom too.

I read somewhere that you can make 'vinegar mushrooms' with leftover wine fruit/pulp. I'm guessing my mushroom was a vinegar mushroom, grown in my root beer "wine" (sugar, blackberry juice, yeast). So my project for the next while is to see how I can make vinegar out of my new baby mushroom.