Back in the early 1970s, when yogurt first started to become popular in the U.S. but wasn’t yet widely available in supermarkets, manufacturers like Salton started selling home yogurt machines that would run overnight with a temperature-controlled water bath and six or so individual-sized covered containers. Those machines are hard to find today but you don’t really need them to make your own yogurt.
You can make very good yogurt in the microwave without any special equipment, and it’s very easy. But although a few older, less fashionable shared recipe sources on the web still mention it, none of the current slow food mavens ever seem to go this route. I’m not sure why–microwaving works beautifully.
Traditional instructions have you heat up the milk to something under a boil and let it cool to just a little hotter than lukewarm–measured either by thermometer at about 118 degrees F, or by testing with a finger before you can stir in the yogurt. That takes a fair amount of time on the stove top, and you have to stand there and stir or risk scorching the bottom of the pan (which you have to scrub). It’s probably a half hour of preparation just to get it going. Then you have to insulate or keep it heating very slightly for 6-12 hours. The most common insulation schemes from the new-slow-food crowd involve all-night ovens kept at 100 degrees F, towels or blankets wrapped around the yogurt pot, hot water jugs surrounding multiple small yogurt pots in a beer chest, crockpots, and other hard-to-believe and hard-to-clean setups.
Just reading about it all–the jumble-sale setups, the 24-step “guides”, the incredible number of pots and things that need washing before, during and after–makes you want to run to the store and buy a tub of ready-made.
Microwaving is a much easier and dare I say better method. It requires a grand total of a microwave oven, a large pyrex bowl, a pyrex or ceramic pie or dinner plate, and a spoon. The milk heats in just a few minutes with no need for stirring and doesn’t scorch at all. Once you stir in the cultures, you let the yogurt sit covered in the microwave with the power off and the door shut. The oven’s a very good insulator, especially in combination with the pyrex bowl and lid. You already have it on your counter–no need to dig weird items out of closets or the garage. The yogurt stays warm for hours with no cockeyed, jury-rigged insulation schemes, and the washing up is, unsurprisingly, simple.
Unlike most microwaving, this is still a slow business–as in, overnight–because it’s the real thing. No matter how you set it up, it takes between 6 and 12 hours for a couple of quarts of warm-to-hot milk with a few spoonfuls of yogurt stirred in to sit and culture undisturbed in the microwave, minding their own business, before the new batch of yogurt is ready to eat.
So it’s not fast, per se, but it’s a perfect thing to set up after supper and revisit the next morning. When you open the microwave door at the end, you can jiggle the bowl gently and see that the milk has set as yogurt. Continue reading
Filed under: cooking, Dairy, Dips, Microwave tricks | Tagged: Dairy, home cheesemaking, labaneh, May Bsisu, microwave cooking, microwave yogurt, nonfat powdered dry milk, recipes, slow food, The Arab Table, yogurt, yogurt making | Comments Off on Yogurt in the microwave
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