Yogurt-Making and Banana Bread-Baking

For the past three weeks, we have been making our own yogurt! This is something we'd been wanting to get back to for a while now, having started our yogurt-making journey a few years back in our previous apartment where the oven was always the perfect temperature for a batch of yogurt. Unfortunately, we don't get the same results with our current oven, so we decided to invest in a yogurt maker to regulate the temperature.

Leo's hand on the milk jar "my milk!"

Our ingredients are simple: farm-fresh raw milk (from a local family farm) and store-bought yogurt as the starter. Here are a couple of yogurt-making success tips we've learned: 1) Do not let the temperature of the milk and starter mixture get above 101 degrees because that is the temperature of the milk in the cow's body. 2) Different yogurt starters produce yogurt of varying degrees of sourness. For example, with Strauss yogurt as the starter, our homemade yogurt was more sour than it was when we used Saint Benoit.

Stirring the milk and yogurt starter

Warming the milk

The consistency of the yogurt is a bit of a surprise every time. When we made 95-degree yogurt, I thought it was too runny, while the 97-degree yogurt was thicker and creamier. To regulate the temperature, we had to add a couple of towels to the bottom of the yogurt maker as padding under the glass jars. This has been the best kind of science experiment because we get to eat the results. AND we know exactly what we're eating because we made it! Homemade food always tastes and feels the best.

Where does the banana bread come in, you are wondering...well, what goes better with yogurt than banana bread? We are a bit obsessed with a gluten-free recipe from this book. It calls for 3 cups of finely ground nuts as the flour and honey as the sweetener. We have been using walnuts and grinding them in our food processor. All I can say is YUM. This recipe is super easy, in fact dangerously easy. I made banana muffins for my office this past week and we just made a loaf for our neighbors down the street as a thank-you for all the awesome hand-me-downs they've passed to Leo. 

Oh, and the best part about the banana bread is that Leo loves it, so it's a relatively healthy treat that we can give him as part of his breakfast or as a dessert. His favorite food is most definitely yogurt but banana bread is an easy second.