A few weeks ago I posted about my yogurt making process on our social media stories, and you all responded with lots of questions. I decided it would be easiest to answer them all in one spot. I am excited that so many of you are wanting to give homemade yogurt a try. I included the step by step process below. I use our Instant Pot, but if you don't own an Instant Pot, a quick Google search can help you find oven and crockpot recipes for yogurt. Because I haven't experimented with any of those recipes, I'm not going to link any of them here, but if you have a recipe that you love, please feel free to pass it on. To get started, you need an Instant Pot with a yogurt setting, half a gallon of whole milk, 1/2 cup of honey, and 2 T. of cultured yogurt (I started with GREEK GODZ greek yogurt from Walmart, but any yogurt that lists live and active cultures on the ingredient list should work). 1. Start by making sure your Instant Pot is clean and dry. Plug it in. Pour in the half gallon of milk. Secure the lid. Make sure the vent is open (you don't want to pressurize the milk), and press the "yogurt" button on the Instant Pot until it reads "boil." Walk away until you hear the prolonged beep letting you know it's ready for the next step. I would say this takes 15-20 minutes. Note: the milk does not actually boil at this point. It scalds. Several of you asked about whether or not the heat hurts the nutrient properties of the milk. From the research I have done, you are just warming the milk enough to activate the starter and not causing significant damage to the nutrients in the milk. 2. When the beeping ends on your boil setting, remove the lid and lift out your pot with potholders. Set the pot on a cooling rack, and allow the milk to cool. The recipe I originally followed said to cool it down to 110 degrees F. before adding the culture, but I have found that 15 minutes in our kitchen is the right amount of time. 3. Once the milk has cooled, ladle out half a cup into a measuring cup. Whisk in two tablespoons of your cultured yogurt. Add 1/2 cup of honey to the milk and yogurt mixture. Whisk well and pour the mixture into the pot with the rest of the milk, whisking to incorporate. There will likely be a film on top of your milk from the scalding process. Don't worry about it. It won't hurt anything. 4. Place the pot back inside of the Instant Pot and secure the lid, again, leaving the vent open. Press the "yogurt" button until it reads 8.5 hours. You can walk away at the point. The Instant Pot will keep the temperature regulated and begin counting up to 8.5 hours. 5. Once the timer goes off, remove the lid and the pot. At this point, I strain my yogurt to remove the whey and thicken the yogurt. You can skip this step, but your yogurt will be more runny and more sour. I wet the yogurt strainer with water because I have found that this helps keep the yogurt from drying out. I then secure the strainer on my colander and place the colander over a mixing bowl that is tall enough to suspend the yogurt above the whey. You can find the strainer I use here. 6. I then press plastic wrap down on top of the yogurt and wrap plastic wrap around the sides of the colander. Before I started doing this, the surface of the yogurt would dry out, leaving chunks in the yogurt. 7. Finally, I place the colander and bowl in the fridge and let it strain over night. The next morning I dump the yogurt into a container with a lid and take the whey to the chickens. They love it. 8. You're left with a thick and creamy yogurt- perfect for eating plain or for mixing with berries and granola. A little liquid may collect on top of your yogurt. This is not a problem. You can just stir it in. That's it. Pretty simple.
I made a double batch last week because we were going through so much yogurt, and it turned out nicely. I did up the cook time to 10 hours because I was using a full gallon of milk, and I needed a bigger bowl to collect the whey, but it was worth the extra time because this double batch lasted us a full week. Have you given homemade yogurt a try before? What tips can you share with us all?
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Stories for Sylia and Sophie, too: So that no matter where this life takes you, you remember where you came from. The week after you were born, we had the coldest weather I have ever experienced, probably the coldest weather Grammie and Pop have ever experienced, especially in Missouri. Your Daddy and Pop were busy bringing loads of hay home before the weather hit, and your Grammie, Uncle Eli, and I were taking care of our cattle at the Lewis Farm when we got a call from Aunt Emma's friend Hannah. Earlier that morning we were eating breakfast when we noticed that the calves knocked the hotwire down from around the pond. We planned to put it back up, but the temperatures were dropping, and we needed to get to the other farm to break ice on the pond so that the cows there could get a good drink. But one of our milk cows at home, decided to break her own ice. Back at home, Emma was up to the top of her legs in ice water. She noticed that one of the cows had fallen through the pond and she rushed down to the water, thinking she could help the cow get her feet underneath her and climb out. Only, it didn't work, and by the time we made it to help, Aunt Emma had been in the water for over half an hour. We didn't know she had been in the water the whole time, otherwise, Grammie would have gotten her get out immediately. I pealed my coat and gloves off and threw them on the pond bank. Uncle Eli did the same. If we were going to be soaked in ice water, we didn't need to be soaked and heavy. Grammie started trying to get ahold of Pop, but he didn't have any service on his cell phone. Uncle Eli went to get the tractor out of the barn, and we dug down in the icy mud to try to get a chain under the cow. The cow's name was Tippi. A few weeks earlier, Aunt Madelaine smashed her hand under the gooseneck hitch of the trailer. So, with one good hand, Aunt Emma freezing in the water (literally), and Uncle Eli trying to keep the tractor from sliding down the icy pond bank on top of us, we weren't making much progress. Hannah helped Grammie put some logs under the tires to keep the tractor from rolling, but every time we pulled on Tippi we thought we were going to break her legs or her neck. We didn't know whether we should scream or cry. We, ladies, did a little of both. Finally, Pop made it home, and Grammie rushed Emma to the house to warm her up. She had been in the water way too long, but in all of the excitement, we didn't realize how long it had been. Pop got here and quickly yanked the ratchet straps off of the load of hay he was hauling. The cow was either going to die in the pond, or die pulling her out, but pulling her out was the only option for saving her. Within a few minutes we had her out of the pond. Just then, our Uncle Jason and Cousin Morgan showed up to help. Grammie frantically started calling for me from the house to come in and warm up. Emma's feet were not looking good, and Grammie was concerned mine might be the same way. Emma's feet looked like they were covered in black and blue bruises. We slowly started warming them up with lukewarm water. After about an hour, she started to get coloring back, but it was several days before all of her feeling returned. We were so thankful she didn't have any frost bite. While all of that was happening, Pop, Uncle Jason, Morgan, Eli, and Hannah hauled Tippi to the barn and set up a makeshift hot box. They put two sawhorses on either side of her, draped her in tarps, and set a space heater up to blow under the tarps. The top tarp was silver, and the kids decided Tippi looked like she was wrapped in tin foil. From there, the hot box was referred to as the Baked Potato. Tippi was not in great shape. She was soaked through and shivering, unable to move her legs. We settled her in the best we could, but we didn't have much hope for her. Meanwhile, we heard stories of other farmers in the area losing cows and calves to the dangerous temps. We left her to warm up and headed on to take care of the rest of the farm chores. That night after milking, we checked on Tippi and she was bright eyed and chewing her cud. A sign that she was alert and somewhat comfortable. This was encouraging, and we headed to the house for a late dinner. Exhausted, Grammie went ahead and fixed the dinner she had laid out earlier that morning. We ate brisket in style, and finished the night with some chocolate covered strawberries that some good friends brought us. Eli's friend Caleb came to stay with us for a few days to help out with the farm work, and we decided to close the store for the week so that we could stay ahead on keeping the livestock fed and watered. The next morning, Tippi was sitting up, eating and drinking, but she couldn't stand on her own. By Monday, we decided if she was ever going to stand again, we were going to have to stand her ourselves. Pop brought the tractor up, and we put one ratchet strap behind her front legs and one strap in front of her back legs. We raised her up with the front end loader, and she was just hanging limp in the air. She looked pretty pathetic. We started rubbing her legs down to help her gain circulation, and after a few minutes she finally pushed against her back legs. She stood, with the support of the straps, for two or three minutes. This felt like a huge win. We continued raising her and lowering her every night, and after a few days we started doing it in the morning, too. Each time, she stood a little bit longer, and towards the end of the week she could stand for several hours at a time, but eventually she would flop back down, unable to stand up on her own. Pop joked that Tippi wasn't standing up on purpose because she was the warmest cow on the whole farm, and she knew once she got better she would have to go back out in the field. After a week of raising her up and getting her feet set underneath her, we were afraid she was never going to stand on her own, and we were starting to get discouraged, but every night Pop would say, "I've got a good feeling about this," and every night she would make just a little bit more progress. A week later, on a Monday morning, just after Pop got back from taking steers and hogs to the processor, he walked into the barn, and Tippi was standing there, bright eyed, and looking straight at him.
She continued getting up and down for the next day or two, and a few nights later we turned her back out with the milk cows. Her calf, Nip, had been nursing off of other momma cows while Tippi was off in the barn healing up. They found each other, and continued on like nothing ever happened. The next morning, Tippi was the first cow in the milk barn, and Pop milked her into the bucket for pig milk. We'd like to think she learned her lesson, but with her cow brain being what it is, we doubt she came out of the experience much better off, but with the effort put forth even when we wanted to give up, the rest of us learned a lot of life lessons in the barn that week. |
Our Farm's Voice
Hello! I'm Madelaine Paige, and I'm so glad we've met. I love mornings, milk cows, and musings. Archives
July 2021
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