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Long time no post, huh? Well, I don’t intend to abandon this blog by any means. Just that my DC trip started a bit of an emotional downward spiral that I’ve just now been able to see my way out of. My weight loss for the last two weeks is 0.8 pounds, which isn’t much, but it’s a small victory against all of the emotional eating I’ve been alternately participating in/resisting. I’m back on track and will certainly be posting a more satisfying loss next Saturday!
I just wanted to share the results of an experiment I just performed… I made yogurt! Yes indeed, I’m becoming one of those people. I used milk powder to reconstitute the milk I used because regular dairy has gotten ridiculously expensive. I went to Sam’s Club and bought a 4.5lb box of Carnation instant fat free powdered milk for about $13.50, which has enough powdered milk for just over 17 jars of yogurt at 32 oz/each.
Now, if it were only the milk that made yogurt, that would be about $0.77 per 32 oz jar! Unfortunately you need a starter, as well — some store-bought yogurt with active cultures. It’s $2.49 for a 32-oz container of yogurt at the store, or 64 tablespoons. You need about 3 tablespoons of yogurt with cultures to start 32 oz of yogurt, making 1 store bought container more than enough for the entire box of powdered milk’s worth of yogurt. So, add that cost to the cost of the powdered milk and the final cost per 32-oz jar of homemade yogurt is $0.86! That’s close to two dollars less than the cost of store yogurt (and if food price inflation keeps on the pace it’s going, it WILL be two dollars less). Plus all the cost is up-front, so you can start when you have money in anticipation of tighter times ahead.
A note on the store-bought yogurt. You may be thinking, sure one container of yogurt is enough to start a 4.5 pound box of powdered milk, but it certainly won’t last long enough to do so! Well, as the Hillbilly Housewife points out, yogurt can be frozen in ice cube trays for future use. So freeze in ice cube trays (they make good portions too), then remove from the trays and bag them to save space in the freezer. Then just pull out the cubes you need!
There are also yogurt starters available for purchase, but they are guaranteed more expensive than the store-bought yogurt method. For instance, Custom Probiotics sells a yogurt starter and also says it can be used to make almond milk yogurt (which, I gotta tell you, is incredibly tempting — I love almond milk but I’ve heard from too many other sources that almond milk will fail as yogurt because it lacks the protein necessary or something). Anyway, doing the math, a $50 bottle of starter there will be good for 125 quarts (32 ounces each) of yogurt. Instead of the $0.09 the store-bought yogurt adds to the total cost of homemade yogurt, yogurt starter will add $0.40 per 32 ounces, taking the cost of your homemade yogurt up to $1.17. Which still isn’t bad, sure, but I think it’s unnecessary when the store-bought method works just fine. And it doesn’t require a $50 start-up cost.
Anyway, as for method, I followed the Hillbilly Housewife method pretty much to a T. To keep it warm I used the oven method as she describes (I don’t own a heating pad or a cooler, so the oven was the best bet). I put it in a warm oven at about 10:30pm, then when I woke up at 7am I had perfect yogurt!! Now I’m off to try to play with it more. I’m going to let it strain in a cheesecloth for a while and see what I can do from there — I don’t know if I’ll go all the way to yogurt cheese but I’d love for it to get to the consistency of Greek yogurt… Mmm….!
This is my -2.4lbs for the week dance:
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Whaddaya mean, you couldn’t see it? I’m doing it right now!
Needless to say, I am one happy camper today!
