Making my own yogurt isn’t as hard as I thought. I should say, we don’t actually eat breakfasts like this every day… or even usually. The kiwi were on a ridiculous sale and the croissants are the Trader Joe’s frozen ones, which are actually really good for frozen baked goods. The yogurt though, I made that all by myself!! (With the help of wikiHow’s guidance)
After reading about the N. Pacific Garbage patch, which I like to refer to as “the trash island,” I got really concerned about the amount of plastic we use. Then, as if worrying about a giant floating trash mass twice the size of TX wasn’t bad enough, all the worries about BPA emerged.

I started to learn a lot about both of these things during finals, a time when I was super stressed out about school. I think I kind of figured that if I couldn’t control school and/or grades at least I could control the plastic in my life. Well, after switching to cloth handkerchiefs, stainless steel straws, going “no poo,” and generally trying to buy as much as we could in as little packaging as possible it was time to face facts. We eat a lot of yogurt and it is nearly impossible to find yogurt in glass jars.

Eventually I decided that a yogurt maker, made from plastic, would ultimately be a better choice than continuing to buy lots of plastic tubs. I’d love to do it for real, with the jar in the pot of boiling water etc, it isn’t quite an option in our tiny 50 sq foot kitchen with an oven that takes the adjective finicky to a whole new level.

So far, the YM9 works just fine for us… I am using an old apple sauce (glass) jar instead of the plastic one that came with the yogurt maker. Apparently the plastic has BPA in it which defeats the purpose of making my own yogurt.

I need to do a little tweaking to the recipe. It wasn’t quite as tart as I’d like, but I only incubated it for 10 hours– the next batch I plan to do for 12. Also, it was a little thin and kind of lumpy (little lumps but still a little weird). This batch didn’t have any powdered milk in it and I suspect that will improve the consistency.

Eventually I’d like to have homemade yogurt made with milk from glass jars all the time. Next, I need to figure out a way to get cheap fruit to freeze so I can stop buying frozen berries for smoothies. They are wrapped in plastic but it is so much cheaper than buying fresh summer fruit and I am not willing to give up an AM smoothie, no sir.