Making Yogurt

Recipe by The View From the Great Island

Making yogurt is a simple thing. It involves heating milk to just below the boiling point to kill off bacteria, cooling it down to a temperature where some added live yogurt culture can thrive, and then letting it sit undisturbed in a warm place long enough to allow those cultures to multiply. It’s magical, and so satisfying. There’s only one tricky part. Can you guess? It’s finding that sweet spot, that perfectly warm under-a-mama-duck type place where the milk can sit undisturbed and transform into creamy tangy healthy yogurt. Most places in the house are either too warm, or too cold. If the temperature is too high, the bacteria will die, and if it’s too low, they won’t multiply. It’s understandable, really, you are attempting to create and maintain the conditions necessary for life itself, which, as it turns out, are pretty exacting I’ve been making yogurt since college, but even though over the years I’ve managed to figure out ways to make it work, it often involves complicated techniques bordering on the absurd, like swaddling my fledgling yogurt with an electric blanket, or hovering over it with a thermometer and taking its temperature every half hour. If you happen to …