Following up on pet drama and yogurt making.

My suspicions have been confirmed. Yes, we do, in fact, have two female fancy mice. Lizzie had a litter over the weekend and Dungeon had her litter yesterday. Now we have many little mouse mutts. I will count them tomorrow when we transfer them to an aquarium to keep them contained till they wean and are big enough to go to the pet store. I'll take a pic tomorrow when I transfer them.

If you read my yogurt making post, the one where I provided a link to a recipe, and are considering making your own yogurt, please read this. I made my third batch last night and this one came out perfect. The first batch, I used organic yogurt, 2% milk from HEB, and about 12-16 oz of yogurt for the starter. This came out very thin, although it tasted great, made great smoothies and yogurt cheese. I held back about the same amount from that batch and made a second batch of yogurt. (Both times, I heated the milk to 160 then cooled to 110). I used 2% milk from Walmart. This batch came out grainy - sort of the texture of ricotta and was much more sour than I was expecting. I strained this and now have a container of sour yogurt ricotta in my fridge. If I can't think of something to do with it, it will be a nice nutritious snack for the chickens.

After batch 2's failure, I decided to do some research to where I could have gone wrong. I found 3 things: 1) it is not recommended to save some from each batch as a starter, like you would do with sour dough. The bacteria loses it's potency. 2) every other source said to heat the milk to 180* rather than 160*. This ensures the opposing bacteria are killed off and all you have working are the ones you need for the yogurt. I still cooled it to 110* before adding the starter. 3) You only need 2 T of starter. That is way less than I used and much more cost effective. I used plain Dannon yogurt. You can freeze the starter and it works just fine when you use it. An ice cube container works perfectly because each cube holds 2T of starter. One container of yogurt gave me 14 doses of starter plus about a cup and a half of yogurt left. If I had another tray, I would have frozen what I had left. Instead we used it in smoothies this morning. I used half whole milk and half 2% milk from HEB for batch 3. I am sure the added milk fat helped.

Two tablespoons of yogurt and one half gallon of milk yields 2 quarts of yogurt. A half gallon of milk is about $2, and one quart of yogurt is about $2. Without getting the calculator out, this comes out to about $1.10 a quart of healthy, additive free yogurt. That so works for me. : )

Batch 3 turned out nothing short of perfect. It had the right thickness, tastes great and I will be going with that formula from now on. Yay!!!!! I love kitchen science! (did I just reveal myself as a nerd???)