When making yogurt, the biggest thing is making sure everything you use is squeaky clean so you don’t grow the wrong “bugs”.

I boil water in my dutch oven to sterilize it, stir my big spoon around in it, then pour the boiling water into my gallon thermos and put the lid on, then set it aside.

In the dutch oven I bring my “milk” (a gallon of whole milk mixed with a quart of heavy cream works great, and you have some of the mixture left over for sauces, your coffee, or whatever!) almost to a boil but not quite, stirring constantly; you heat it over medium until there are little bubbles around the edges, and it starts to steam. If it scalds at all it won’t culture (you can either make a vat of soup or throw it away if it scalds), so you can’t really do it more quickly over high heat…but it goes a little faster if you bring it to room temp first.

Remove the “milk” from the heat and let cool until a skin forms on the top. Remove that, then in a small bowl temper about 1/4-1/2 (I don’t measure) plain yogurt with a little of the warm milk, then stir it all into the pot.

Pour the extremely hot water out of the thermos, immediately add the milk mixture back into it, cap it tightly, and set it on top of the fridge for about 24 hours. I've left it up to 36 hours, and have eaten some at about 20 hours...it's all good...

It’s very easy, the most tedious part is the stirring.

(Just as a side note: before I start this I put some baking soda and some vinegar into my kitchen drain; it bubbles while I work, and then after I pour the water out of the thermos the drain and pipes are fresh and clean! Just sayin’…)

You can flavor it in your dish with just about anything, sweeten it, or whatever when you serve it. My favorite way to eat it is with a drop of liquid sucralose, a splash of vanilla, and a generous sprinkle of cinnamon.

Once you taste your own yogurt - rich and satisfying, creamy and thick - boughten will always taste like a cheap imitation!
 
I will start moving my recipes here from my blogger pages, and hope to have them all moved by the end of the year. I will also save the entire blog from over there to a pdf file, which I will make available for download, if anyone would like it. It will contain my menus, past shopping lists/costs, and general lowcarb-related posts; I don't think that the program I'll be using will save all of the comments that were posted to the blog, I'm sorry about that...

As of the 1st of the year (2013) I will be blogging only here, and no longer at my blogger site.  In the meantime, what you see here will be copies of the recipes I had there, ordered by date as they were originally, and I plan to add some photos as well, if I have them available. (I'm usually too impatient to take pictures of my meals before I eat them!)

And that's that :).