Thursday, August 20, 2009

Homemade crockpot yogurt, big success!

We've gone so far over our food budget its ridiculous. I'm trying to use up the things we have around here rather then buy a bunch more food. (we are going to the farmers market today) Our fridge held the last small container of yogurt, should we buy more? Its on sale 6 ounces for .59 cents. Seems pretty cheap right? I spent $1.50 on half a gallon of milk. That is 64 ounces. Using A Year of Crockpotting's recipe I made yogurt right in the crockpot. My homemade yogurt cost 2 cents an ounce. I used our last container or yogurt (flavored) as the starter, 2% milk, and 1 tablespoon of bulk gelatin when I added the starter. The Gelatin really helps thicken the yogurt, its like yoplait's thick and creamy kind. Now we have half a gallon of unflavored yogurt. Did i mention we hate plain yogurt?

I took all the blackberries we had left from this picking, and ran them through the food processor. After grinding them into a pulpy syrup I ran the syrup through a strainer. After being free of blackberry seeds I added sugar in till the syrup tasted sweet. I'm hoping my blackberry syrup will flavor the yogurt. I have heard of adding jam and preserves to flavor the yogurt, probably try that as well.

Cost of homemade yogurt: Free blackberries, few pennies for the sugar, Milk $1.50, few pennies for electricity, few pennies for bulk gelatin.
Sorry I can't be precise but I dont keep the prices of my bulk items.

I can tell you that half a gallon of the sale priced yogurt would cost $6.29. BIG difference. Not to mention the waste from 10/11 small plastic containers. The only trash generated with my version was the milk jug.

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