Homemade Yogurt

I looked up a recipe for yogurt on allrecipes.com because I had two gallons of milk starting to turn sour at the same time and I wondered if I could use it for yogurt and not have it taste bad. So, I experimented. All it cost me was like a dollar fifty. I bought a candy thermometer and a small unflavored yogurt with live cultures. With it I made 5 quarts of yogurt! It turned out perfectly. I recommend the recipe that has all the temperatures with it. It is a pain, but it worked perfectly. (I tried it once before without a thermometer and the yogurt came out kind of gooey and slimey--wrong texture) Because of my past experience I was afraid to try. I knew my family would not eat 5 quarts of unflavored yogurt, so I added about a cup and a half of sugar and some vanilla to the batch. It was not according to the recipe, so I was afraid it might ruin it. It didn't. It turned out GREAT! and they downed it all like crazy. We couldn't taste the slightly sour milk at all. It was perfect. I also tried making homemade icecream with the slightly sour milk and it worked out well, too. So, now I have two things to do with millk just starting to sour.

FoodStorage: I canned a ton of milk powder when we were first married and had lots of calcium needing little kids. Now it is all about to expire. So this week I tried it entirely with powdered milk and it WORKED GREAT and TASTES GREAT. It was fun to put blueberry syrup on it, hershey's syrup, and blended strawberries.

TIPS: The recipe calls for keeping it warm on the stove and checking the temperature. I put it in a plastic cooler with hot water (the right temp I think it was 115 degrees) all around it up to the height of the yogurt. Shut the cooler and left it for six hours. I didn't have to babysit it or keep the stove on and the yogurt worked perfectly.