Health Benefits of Homemade Yogurt

I have been making a lot of yogurt lately. I make it from week-old raw milk, which has almost started to go sour, but after a thorough boiling, it smells fresh and very milky all over again. If you like the smell of warm milk, this will give you a feeling of nostalgia. At my house, Thursday night is yogurt making night, and Friday morning when I get up at six am, I can smell yogurt even before I get to the kitchen.

My homemade yogurt comes out creamy and thick

I explained my method of making yogurt in this earlier post, in which my mother appears and shows the process I learned from her.  I leave the yogurt in my oven in glass and porcelain containers on baking trays overnight with the oven set to "Bake" and the temperature set to "wm" --which means warm. It's a setting just to keep food warm, not to actually bake it. This makes the oven just warm enough for the yogurt bacteria to grow in.

The yogurt comes out so thick and creamy that I can hold the container upside down and nothing spills out. The very best containers I have are porcelain from Meito China, Japan that I inherited from my grandmother. They allow the water from the milk to condense and come out through the pores in the porcelain. That leaves the yogurt extra creamy,

Today, though, I do not want to focus on how to make the yogurt or even how absolutely wonderful it tastes. Instead, I want to talk about what making and eating your own yogurt can do to improve your ability to eat other foods.

I am not a health nut. I hate dietary restrictions. I want to be able to eat anything and everything that appeals to me. I don't want to live in some kind of apartheid world  or a protected bubble,  where everybody else is eating all sorts of foods, but I have to turn everything down because it's not on my diet. Eating yogurt on a weekly basis allows me to sample a wide range of foods that I could not eat if I were not eating this much yogurt.

In the past couple of decades, I gradually developed all sorts of food sensitivities. I suddenly could not eat bread and eggs or even avocados. These were foods I had liked, but I could not bear them any more, because they upset my stomach. But now that I spend half a week eating yogurt with every other meal, I can spend the other half of the week eating whatever I want.

As an example, this Tuesday I went out with my daughter and two of her friends for a trip to the mall. That day I ate beef Teriyaki with noodles -- not rice-- for an early lunch, cheesecake and iced coffee with cappuccino for a late lunch meal, and a hot dog with fries with a peanut butter shake for dinner. And my stomach did not get upset. Not at all!

I even find I can eat an occasional egg -- white and yolk and all -- now! But the trick is, you have to go back to yogurt for the other half of the week. And I don't mean meals consisting only of yogurt. I mean normal meals of which yogurt is a component.  Since I like my homemade yogurt, that is no sacrifice.

There is -- to me -- no joy in a restricted diet. I like to be able to join in a festive meal where nothing is off limits. But the best way to do that is to make sure my gut is in the best of shape to meet any challenge. My creamy, homemade yogurt helps me do that!

How To Make Yogurt at Home

My mother has been making excellent homemade yogurt for decades now, but I never really took the time to observe her when she did it, so I myself had no idea what to do. The day after Thanksgiving, I asked my mother how she does it.  She very graciously agreed to show me.

Boiling milk
(If you want to avoid a crust forming, stir constantly.)

Ingredients:

milk, plain yogurt for starter




Instructions.

My mother pours the milk into the bowl containing yogurt starter

1. Take milk, of whatever quantity you choose, and boil it.
2, Allow the milk to cool back down to room temperature.
3. If there is a crust formed, remove it.
4. Add one teaspoon of plain store bought yogurt for every cup of milk you boiled. This will be your yogurt starter, as it contains a live culture.
5. Stir the yogurt tablespoons into the milk until it is all as homogeneous as possible.
6. Pour the mixture into glass cups of individual serving size.
7. Place in a warm spot for eight hours. (For us, the warm place was the oven, periodically warmed just  a little, but not enough to actually bake anything. But in the summer you could achieve the same result by placing the cups in a hot car parked outside.)
8. Chill the yogurt in the refrigerator before serving. 

The finished product

This kind of yogurt is called לבן (leben) in Hebrew. It is not sweet at all and has a nice, slightly  tart taste.

Of course, you could add fresh fruit for a very special dessert. But we like it plain.

Let your family taste the yogurt and see what they think!