I'm Not Kidding, It REALLY is That Easy to Make Your Own Yogurt

I started making yogurt around the time that I got interested in making my own cheese. The whole concept of food preservation is very interesting to me, from a practical, as well as scientific perspective. The “alchemic” reactions of bacteria, given certain environments, and the ability of acidity or pressure and heat to kill off harmful bacteria. Everything from canning to drying and salting, fermenting pickles to culturing cheeses and yogurt.

I am still working on finding the patience needed for good cheese making, but since yogurt is so simple and easy to do and I love it and it is so much more delicious and better for you than the vast majority of yogurts you can get in grocery stores, I keep on making it. The best yogurt I can find in store, is a little expensive, given my extensive consumption habit, and being able to extend the life of my milk if I find I have too much to consume before it goes bad, is a wonderful thing. I have touted the glories of making your own yogurt to many friends and promised to share my methods so many times, that I figured I would share it here also.

Homemade Yogurt with Homemade Granola

One important note, before we get started on yogurt making methods, is that of the importance of cleanliness in this whole process. It is very important to be sure that all of the pots, pans, bowls, jars, and utensils coming in contact with your milk and yogurt in this process are very clean, so as not to introduce any “bad” bacteria. On the flip side of this, the introduction of any detergents lingering on any of the above mentioned gear can also kill the “good” bacteria, leading to unsatisfactory results. I would recommend cleaning with a very small amount of mild soap, and very hot water, and rinsing very well. Alternatively, you could boil any of the gear that can be boiled for about 10min to sterilize or wash with vinegar, and rinse. However you choose to do it, just be sure that the equipment is quite clean and no longer soapy.

Homemade Yogurt Recipe:

Equipment:

    - heavy bottomed stainless steel pot

    - cheese thermometer (or any good thermometer including the range 100-180)

    - large, wide bowl (optional, preferably stainless steel)

    - funnel

    - jars

    - small cooler

    - towels

    - hot water bottle, or rice bag, etc

Ingredients:

- good quality, plain Yogurt with live cultures 1Tbsp/Qt of milk used (the fewer ingredients the better) Locally, I use Thomas Organic Creamery, plain yogurt.

- Milk equal to the amount of finished yogurt you desire, preferably milk that has not been “ultra pasteurized” (pasteurized is ok) Locally, I use Calder Dairy, whole milk.        * here is a link to further information on this topic

Heating up the milk to 180

    Begin by heating the milk in the stainless steel pot, over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until milk reaches 180 degrees. Remove from heat. Cool milk to 110 degrees, this can be done in a large, wide bowl, stirring will help the milk cool more quickly.

    While milk is cooling, prepare cooler, by adding towels and hot water bottle. Prepare jars by heating with warm water (to prevent cracking). Add 1Tbsp of yogurt to each quart jar.

Waiting for the milk to cool to 110

Once milk has reached 110 degrees, pour into each jar, cap and shake gently to mix in yogurt. Place jars in cooler, wrap with towels and set the water bottle on top. Use the thermometer to ensure that the internal temperature of the cooler stays between 100 and  116 degrees. Prop the lid open to vent if needed. When cooler is at correct temp, close and leave undisturbed for 6 or more hours. After 6 hours, the jars can be checked by tilting to the side and looking to see if the yogurt pulls away from the side of the jar. There will be some clearish liquid in the jars also, this is whey, it can be poured off, and either saved (click here for uses) or discarded. I would not suggest leaving the yogurt to set any longer than about 8 hours. Then it can be placed in the refrigerator. You can save some of this yogurt for the next time you make yogurt and it becomes a kind of daisy chain of delicious, good for you yogurty happiness.

The key reason, I find this yogurt to be superior to most store bought yogurt, is that in the manufacturing process, most products are completely decimated by over pasteurization, then the beneficial bacteria have to be added back in after the fact. The vast majority of yogurts also have a lot of additives, which I really don’t want. If I buy yogurt, I’d like it to be just yogurt.

Here is a link to the place I learned to make yogurt, and a link to some good troubleshooting. If you try this and have any questions, please do feel free to leave a comment below, I’ll do my best to answer any question.

Happy Yogurting!

Using the Whole Animal

For me there is a responsibility inherent in the taking of a life. Or, at least this is what I tell myself. While I do not feel the need to “use” the chipmunks that are killed in defense of my garden and the structural integrity of my home, nor do I feel compelled to save up all of the bugs I’ve killed until I have enough for a stir fry, I really do feel like, when I go out and hunt and kill an animal, I have an obligation to do my very best to make use of as much of that animal as I can.

In my effort to make this possible I am learning older ways of cooking. I am slowly working my way back in time, following the traditions of hunters who came before me. It wasn’t that long ago {and, many hunters still do} that is was very common to keep some internal organs; the bones, heart & liver, parts generally referred to as offal: the entrails and internal organs of an animal used as food. The practice of saving and eating these parts of the animal existed in my parents generation and to some small degree in mine, so I did not have to go very far back to find out about how to exercise this in my own life.

For further uses of the animal (kidneys, tongue, brain, skin, feathers, hooves, etc…) I am looking farther back, hoping to find information about how to utilize other parts that I am less familiar with. I am learning ways to utilize the feathers from a turkey, and the skin and various bones from other animals. I am hoping to gather much more information about this as I learn to hunt a greater diversity of animals..

It is my goal to see that no part of any animal I kill go into a landfill.

Some of the turkey feather earrings I made from my spring bird

When I harvested my first animal, a turkey, this spring I took special care to reserve the heart & liver for what would be the very first meal I would have from this bird, WIld Turkey Offal Rice. I am saddened now, when I realize that I unknowingly, buried the gizzard along with the intestines and lungs, out in the field. I would very much have liked to eat that as well, but this is a learning journey and mistakes are to be expected, they are how we learn best. I used a number of the feathers to make jewelry for friends and family. I am also fortunate to have friends that know how to make arrow fletching from the wing feathers and who needed a wing for traditional, spiritual offerings. I am still learning ways that I can use these feathers. My family has enjoyed several meals from the meat and the bones provided a rich golden stock that has been canned and stored on the larder shelves for another day. I plan to post recipes for the way we used each part of the bird in subsequent posts, but here I will share my recipe for Turkey Offal Rice. A delicious, warming meal best prepared the evening of your harvest, or the following day.

Wild Turkey Offal Rice:

    - Turkey Offal (heart, liver, gizzard, etc) cut into small pieces

    - 1 medium to large Onion

    - 2-3 Tbs Fat: oil, butter, bacon fat (the amount depends on the amount of offal used)

    - Salt and Pepper to taste

    - 2 cups Rice (I prefer a wild rice, brown rice mix)

    - 2 cups Chicken or Turkey Stock

    - 2 cups Water

Rinse rice and place into rice cooker. Add stock to rice cooker. Add enough water to bring up to the level as indicated on rice cooker for 2cups of rice.

Preheat a cast iron skillet over medium heat. Chop onion into fine dice. Add oil to pan. Add Onions to pan and cook until translucent. Add offal to pan, season with salt and pepper and and turn heat to med-high, cook, stirring occasionally until cooked through. Turn off and set aside.

Once the rice is finished cooking, turn heat in skillet back up and slowly add rice, stirring to incorporate until you feel you have reached a nice balance between rice and meat. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Enjoy!

The Power of the U-Pick Ritual

Every year without fail, I get excited about the beginning of the fruit picking season all over again. At the end of the year when we have finished the blueberries and the apples and I finally get through processing them all, I think it will be so nice to have a long break from the whole cycle. From picking through processing and packaging for storage it demands no small amount of time and effort. But it never fails, that, as May/June rolls around the excitement builds over the beginning of the rhubarb then the strawberries. My mom used to take us strawberry picking every year as small children and it built a strong connection between earth, food, nature, sustenance, joy….

a bounty of rhubarb from my garden

Honestly I think I can trace much of my obsession with food and nature back to the time I spent as a very young child pulling food from the dirt with my own 2 hands, wiping the grit away on my coveralls and putting it directly into my mouth. Repeating that act as a young child, over and over, year after year solidified deep within me these things:

1) Food is supposed to grow from the earth and not be concocted in some factory

2) Food should be grown in such a way that anyone can safely walk to where it is growing  (even as a child) and pluck it from its plant and put it directly into their mouth

3) It is right and good to get dirty in the acquisition of that which sustains you

4) Nature herself provides all that we need to survive, not the constructs of man, or money, or social structure

the strawberries a Whittaker's Barry Farm in Ida, MI are beautiful

I do realize that it is entirely possible that I have over-romanticized the entire thing, but it is too late for me, I am in love! Every spring, like clockwork, the strawberry fields call to me and I cannot resist.

From Ramen Noodles to Wild Game

My interest in hunting came well before I ever could’ve envisioned myself wearing camo, wielding a gun or field dressing game. It began, like so many other major changes in my life, with a burning question. “What is in my food?”

This question arose as a natural progression from the changing of roles within my family. We went from a household run by college students, homeschooling our son and trying to make ends meet, to something more like we are now; one parent working outside the home and one mainly inside the home. If I was going to be the one running the house and my primary duties were to revolve around the education of our son and feeding our family, I was determined to do a damn fine job. So I rolled up my sleeves and dove in neck deep to answer another question, “What is in the food that I am feeding my family? and Can I do better?”

If I am the feeder of my family, do I not owe it to them to at least know what I am feeding them? and at best improve the level of ingredients until I reach an answer to the question that will allow me to sleep well at night? Our initial diet, when I started down this path consisted of things like Ramen Noodles, Pop Tarts and Kool Aid. This was clearly not cutting it.

I began to move my family’s diet away from conventional foods and toward organic food. We kept all of the modern conveniences of microwave meals and boxes of mac n cheese, but we had the “good” kind… or did we? My thinking at the time was that the real danger in the food came from the chemicals used in its growth and production. I also had a misconception that the "organic" label meant more than it really did. I naively assumed (as many people do) that it meant that the food was healthier, had no chemicals anywhere in the production, and that it was grown ethically. If it was meat, I assumed the organic meat producers would also treat the animals well.

        My son, at 6yrs old, very much approved of the “poptart lifestyle”

I quickly began to feel uneasy about the ingredient lists on the organic instant burritos and the organic jalapeno cheetos. Was it really that much better? I mean, they cost so much more than the “conventional” food and the ingredient list was still a frightening attempt at a chemistry lesson. Now, instead of eating your everyday run of the mill rocket fuel, we had premium organic rocket fuel. The improvement seemed hardly worth the cost. Discovering that there were no more ethics involved in the organic labeling than the conventional foods was disheartening. The organic label was allowed to go onto foods that had been grown in a large monoculture with "organic pesticides" or "organic fertilizers" sometimes used in excess and washing down steams and into lakes and oceans, or with any amount of synthetics and chemicals in the foods, including high fructose corn syrup, which seemed like it was quickly invading every food! I was having a very difficult time puzzling out the right direction for our food choices… vegetarian? organic? free range? grass fed? sugar free? Which things mattered most? How many vendors would we have to visit to put together the whole shopping list? Eventually through a lot of sleepless nights and a library trips I came to the answers that seemed to most satisfactorily answer my questions.

My preference was for foods that were as close to “whole foods” as possible, (ie: apple, wheat berry, meat, milk) unadulterated and unprocessed, with as few ingredients as possible, ideally one. Additionally I prefer that our food be produced as close, geographically, to where I live and shop as possible. I wanted to be able to look the person who grew or raised or made my food directly in the eye across a small table, ask them how they do the work they do, and buy that food right from their hands. Our local farmer's market allowed us to do just that. There is something so very powerful about building a relationship with the people who feed you, it literally changes, not just the way you eat, but the way you look at the whole world. It connects you to the rest of humanity in a deep and profound way that changes you forever. I decided that I would prefer organic, but being close to home is more important in some cases. As for meat I wanted to use it more sparingly than before, but meat, dairy & eggs should all be free range, pastured, grass fed, which many small, local farmers do simply because it is easier and more productive on the small scale. I also found that the gratification of growing what food I could grow my self, and the direct knowledge of it's path to my table was the most comforting of all food choices. It did not take long for me to realize that, in following this entire line of thinking to its logical end, the most “free range” animals are wild, and having my direct connection to that food production initiated the beginning of my journey in the realm of a hunter.

My first “harvest” a spring turkey April 29, 2014

The next year I would, buy my first gun, take my hunter safety course and embark on one of the least expected adventures of my life. I would enter a world in which I studied and stalked my food. I would learned to use and love guns. I would take life in order to give life. I would do my part in what Clarissa Pinkola Estes calls the life/death/life cycle, that is a necessary part of a natural existence.