GREEK YOGURT (Homemade, from scratch!)

Leia em PORTUGUÊS

It's been a while since Greek yogurt became part of my "to try" list. This is not my first time making homemade yogurt, though. I've had successful batches, and others that were not so successful, either because it did not thicken enough or because it was excessively tart. Well, this time I researched a lot about making yogurt from scratch and found out that there were things I really did not pay much attention to in the past. So, this is a new beginning on making yogurt for me, and I knew that a successful Greek yogurt depended on a successful yogurt in the first place.

While researching for the perfect homemade yogurt, I read many articles and blog posts on the web, but Paula's Salad in a Jar was the one with the most detailed instructions, including a "Troubleshooting" section, can you believe that? I highly recommend that you follow her steps if you ever want to try your hand at homemade yogurt. Thanks Paula for sharing all your experience, which led to my Greek Yogurt made to perfection on my first try. I felt like you were there in my kitchen teaching me :o)

It wouldn't be fair not to also mention  WikiHow, which has a very complete and detailed step by step recipe as well, and also includes a how-to video.

To start off, I bought a yogurt maker that does not require energy. It is a large insulating bottle with a baffle where you place a 1 liter lidded jar with your milk and starter, and some hot water to maintain a warm environment for incubation.. I used a sachet of milk powder+starter that came with the product. It yielded a nice yogurt, and I saved some of it as a starter to make my own yogurt from scratch, after all, each sachet costs around 9 dollars! Following Paula's instructions, I came up with this perfectly set liter of homemade yogurt.

Next step was to turn my ordinary yogurt into Greek Yogurt which means to strain your yogurt so that your final product is thicker and creamier. Of course it will also reduce in volume: 1 liter yogurt yields 1/2 liter Greek Yogurt. For this step, I used a strainer over a jar (the food processor jar was perfect to fit my strainer).

Then, I lined the strainer with cheese cloth.

I carefully ladled the yogurt into the lined strainer.

I covered with a sauce pan lid and let it strain in the fridge for 3 hours. The jar collected the whey, which I will try using to make homemade bread (I'll let you know how it turns out).

After 3 hours draining in the fridge, this is how it looked like:

I transferred the yogurt to a glass bowl.

Then, I whisked it until I had no lumps and... 

voilá ! Greek Yogurt!

Simple as that!