This is one of my staples. I make this every two weeks and have it for my breakfast. Consequently, nothing will make you recover faster from a long night out than a glass of stirred yogurt. I will confess that most of my knowledge came from Dr. Fankhauser's website that I highly recommend if you want to easily get into making cheese. I do some things a bit differently. So, why yogurt? They contain probiotics for one. Check out Webmd's article on it. As someone that loves yogurt and wants to eat good on a budget, making it myself just makes sense. I can make 5 quarts of amazing yogurt for about $10 - that is using $6 milk. I typically end up having enough yogurt for me and my roommate for two weeks plus a labneh (soft, spreadable, yogurt cheese for the same time period.) I use non homogenized Wright Dairy milk in my yogurt that I buy at Manna Grocery here in Tuscaloosa. In Birmingham you can buy it at V. Richard's or Organic Harvest.
Before we get to yogurt, lets get into the economics of milk production. Skip ahead if this sounds boring. Like most food from the modern agricultural supply chain, milk has become a highly commoditized product. That just means that one brand of milk is virtually indistinguishable from the other. When I was getting my economics degree, most professors used corn as the example of a purely competitive market. Essentially, farmers have to take whatever price the market (you the consumer) is paying at that time. This price will be based on supply and demand. This means that even if you make "better" milk than your neighboring farmer, you will still get market price for it almost all the time. The only way to make more money is to convince people you milk is better than everyone else's. Trust me when I tell you, The Wright Dairy's is better. In this world of basically pure competition, the only way to make a profit (accounting, not economic) is to have the lowest cost. Since, waste is a form of cost, it is important that you minimize waste. This means having milk that can be shipped the farthest distance and lasts the longest. One way that business has met this "challenge" is to homogenize milk. Essentially, they put milk under enormous pressure to force the fat and water and protein and sugar and whatever else is in the milk to distribute evenly throughout the milk. This means no cream will rise to the top of the milk. This means no butter. This means not very good for making cheese or yogurt really. There is a work around I will discuss in the next post. In fact, there are those that believe that many people that thik they have an issue with lactose intolerance really just cant digest this processed "milk" I have not been able to find any credible evidence that this is true but having had a lot of both I certainly prefer the non-homogenized. The other issue is pasteurization. You can do this essentially two ways. You can heat milk to 160 degrees for 30 minutes (low heat - the way Wright's Dairy does it) or you can Ultra Heat Pasteurize it to 275 degrees for 1-2 seconds (the way most is processed commercially). When trying to get a clean break in the curd from the whey, the latter can cause an issue in cheese. If you are going to make yogurt or labneh it can work but typically not in cheese. All in all, the flavor is just destroyed at these temperatures in my opinion. I love the thought of tasting the seasonality of what the cows are eating when I drink my milk. I get that when I drink non-homogenized, low heat pasteurized milk.
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