Well, we’ve finally done it. We’ve been making our own yogurt for almost three years now. You need to let it sit out for eight hours to culture at room temperature. However, during the colder months the ambient air is a bit chilly, so we wrap it in a kitchen towel and put in in the (cold) oven. The yogurt itself is still 120 degrees when it goes in, and it will retain this heat much better in the oven than sitting out. This gives the culturing process a bit of a boost.
Today we put it in the oven at 11am and completely forgot until we needed to put our dinner in the oven, which we had already pre-heated! We cooked the yogurt, and melted the plastic lid of the jar to our kitchen towel. Epic fail!
We always said that we would be open on this blog and post warts and all. Lesson learned: when we put yogurt in the oven, we need to put a post-it on the temperature controls so that we can’t possibly make this error again. Instead, we’ll find a new error to make next time.
Thanks for sharing a kitchen failure; it’s nice to know that we all do silly things in the name of homemade. Have you tried an electric yogurt maker? They’re fairly inexpensive and pump out 6 or 8 cute little glass jars at a time. Completely reusable and because it’s on the countertop is not at risk of extra “cooking”
I haven’t ever tried that. We usually get really good results with our low-tech version and don’t have a big enough kitchen for a lot of appliances. Erik taped a big note over the oven controls yesterday when we made the new batch, which was enough of a reminder. Now that I’m thinking about it, though, it might be better to use the microwave instead of the oven. It’s smaller than the oven, so the heat would be trapped better, and I never turn it on without first opening it up.
That’s true – you never need to preheat the microwave!