Yogurt

As easy as it is to go to a shop and purchase yogurt, there is something really satisfying about making your own. This is simple to do and requires no special equipment.
First of all, you will need full cream milk (one liter) as well as a pot of shop bought yogurt which have live cultures. Heat the milk to anywhere between 35°C to 45°C in a thick based pot. If you're lucky enough to have a clay pot, that's even better. In a separate bowl, mix your pot of yogurt with a few spoons of the warm milk as well as two teaspoons of sugar (to activate the bacteria) and stir into the warm milk. The secret now is to keep the milk mixture still and at a constant temperature. You could wrap it in a blanket or leave it near the central heating in your house or, as I did, place the mixture in a thermos flask and off you go. After about 10 hours, the yogurt will have formed.
There are a number of factors which will make your final product better or worse and these you will only discover as you go along. Some milk and yogurt are more pasteurized than others and therefore have less active bacteria in it which will make the process slower if not impossible. Sometimes your yogurt will stay pretty liquid. In this case, you could add half a cup of dried milk to the initial process to help it thicken up.
Once your yogurt is done, you can enjoy it as it is (natural yogurt) or you could blend fruit like strawberries or blackberries in a blender and stir some into your yogurt to create your own flavours.
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