Yogurt and Fruit Sauces

My family LOVES yogurt, and Allison made some home made yogurt the other day. I thought it sounded really easy and at least worth a try. So last night I started the LONG process of making yogurt. It was super easy and it turned out pretty good for the first attempt. The whole process takes about 14 hours and about 13 hours and 55 minutes of that time is waiting... to bring milk up to temperature, to bring milk back down to temperature, then allowing yogurt to metamorphosis.

I followed Allison's recipe(scroll down once you open page), but I used skim milk and fat free Greek yogurt. I was a bit worried it wouldn't turn out because of that but it didn't seem to matter. I also put the crock pot with yogurt mix inside a cooler with some of our water bottles filled with HOT tap water then stuffed the open spaces with towels. I drained mine for about an hour (which is way less than what she recommended...) and dumped the whey before I actually saw the consistency of the yogurt. I wish I would have kept it to mix some back in, as minr is pretty thick.



For the fruit sauces I just put the fruit and a little sugar in a sauce pan and cooked on medium till it was a little soupy. For the Blueberry sauce I took half of this soupy stuff and blended it then returned it back to the batch. I blended all of the cherry batch because I only cut the cherries in half. If I were to do a larger batch of cherry sauce I might invest in a cherry pitter, that took a while to do by hand.

Learned: It was a great process to go through, and one that I may continue... at least until I go back to work...