I am not a hippie!

Last night K and I made our second attempt at yogurt. The first time, we tried Laurie Colwin's recipe (as easy as having a baby, she says, but quicker and less painful). Laurie Colwin says not to use skim milk since it's too watery to begin with, but we were using dry milk powder, since it's cheaper, and K reasoned that if we simply increased the proportion of dry milk to water that would make it less watery. Possibly this would have worked, but we also forgot to boil the milk, and then there was the question of incubation.

There are many choices of how to incubate yogurt. You can use a yogurt maker if you have one, but of course we do not. You can wrap it in an old sweater or a baby blanket and stick it in a warm oven. You can put it in a warm water bath over the stove and turn one of the burners on from time to time. You can place it over the pilot light overnight.

That first time, we put the yogurt in glass jars in a baking pan filled with water and left it in the oven overnight (the oven was off). In the morning, we took it out - it had separated and a skin had formed on top (because we hadn't boiled the milk). It looked rather nasty, but we put it in the fridge anyway to see what would happen.

Nothing did. We did not even try that yogurt - it simply looked too hazardous. We ended up pouring it down the sink and resolved that next time we would follow the directions.

Last night we tried a yogurt recipe from the More With Less Cookbook - my standby. It called for a combination of dry and condensed milk and warm water in addition to the starter. To be on the safe side, I also decided to boil the jars. Without tongs, removing the jars from the boiling water was a two person job - I scooped them out with the strainer, and then K used two forks to hold the jar steady while we emptied it and then deposited it on the counter. Miraculously, we managed to avoid scalding ourselves. I poured the yogurt into the jars, screwed on the lids, and put them in a dish of warm water on top of the stove.

We were anxious about turning on the burners under a glass baking dish - I was afraid it might explode. Instead, we heated round after round of water, and each time the water in the dish cooled down, I would bail it out with a cup and pour in fresh hot water. This was a very tiresome procedure and needed to be done every fifteen minutes.

Eventually I grew tired and bored, so I turned the oven on its lowest setting and stuck the jars, still in their warm water bath, in there overnight. I had no idea how hot the lowest setting was, because all the numbers have worn off the knob of our stove and we always have to guess at the temperature, but I figured it couldn't be more than 200 degrees, which was only 80 degrees hotter than the yogurt was supposed to be.

In the morning, I stumbled blearily into the kitchen and removed the yogurt from the oven. It still looked completely watery, but I put it in the fridge anyway.

When I came home this afternoon, I took out one of the jars and examined it. Stirring it with a chopstick, I found that it was somewhat thicker than regular whole milk, but by no means did it have the thick, junket-like consistency of actual yogurt. I poured some into a bowl and tried it.

It's slightly tangy, but much less sour than the store-bought starter. It also has that peculiar canned quality of condensed milk. It's not bad, and hopefully it's not fatal, but I'm not sure what we are going to do with four jars of the stuff.

It's not awful, anyway. I mean, it's not worse than ... uh, it's not the worst part of my day, but we won't go there.

I guess I could always use it in cooking.