Cheap and EASY home made yoghurt

There are a few recipes on the board for making your own yoghurt, but dare I suggest all this messing about with thermometers and saucepans is quite unnecessary once you have calibrated your system.

Let me explain - you need to do 3 things;

(1) Heat the milk or half and half to kill all the bad bacteria - don't boil it 85 - 90 C/185 - 195 F is fine. YOU CAN USE YOUR MICROWAVE lol - a bit of trial and error here and you can just use the timer after the first time - with my old microwave it takes 11 minutes on high to heat a litre (roughly 1 US quart) - obviously this will vary with your microwave (a bit) and the amount of milk you use (a lot).

(2) You need to cool it to 44 C/ 110 F - YOU CAN USE YOUR FRIDGE lol - the same deal try it until all you need is the timer. (about 35 minutes in my fridge for the litre (so long as the door isn't opened and closed a lot)

(3) Then all you need is to mix in a spoon of the old batch - or a spoon of store bought with live cultures - and insulate it for at least 4 hours although I always leave it overnight and sometimes forget it for 24 hours. I have a glass bottle which fits in an insulated sleeve with a lid - made by Decor in Australia - but any form of insulation is fine. If you are going to use a thermos I would suggest you may want to cool it a bit closer to the ideal blood temperature as a thermos would be very efficient - but again a trial or two will tell.

The larger the quantity the easier this is - and it lasts for ages in the fridge - if you let it.

Hope this helps.

Malcolm

I just use my yogurt machine. It cost under $20 (I had a cupon so I got it and a CD for $8). I just ordered it from amazon.com I found with the weird weather and humidity here I just could never get a successful batch of yogurt going.

I use the carb countdown milk, that way I know it has less carbs. If you start with less then you end with less

Good idea. What does that end up tasting like? Consistency?

I use half Carb Countdown and half half-and-half, and it's got a lovely creamy mouthfeel. To firm up the consistency, I also sprinkle about 1/2 tsp unflavored gelatin over the cold milk and let it sit 5 min, then stir while heating to dissolve the gelatin.

The whole milk carb countdown turned out great. I think I tried the half and half and carb countdown once and got almost a custard it was so thick.

The chocolate turned out runny and kind of grainy. I think a large difference is the fat in whoel milk. I plan on trying the skim here soon, and I may try the gelitin idea when I heat my milk.

I've noticed other things can effect consistancy as well. How fast you warm and cool the milk, how much you stir it while warming and so on. I also tend to leave my yogurt going over night, around 12 hours, so that helps the thickness as well.

I count the carbs of everything...I don't go by net carbs and all that lalalalalalala..stuff...if it's got carbs, it's got carbs.

I eat minimal amounts of yogurt, I actually love the carb control yogurt and it is portioned well in my opinion.

Perhaps I will try some plain non-flavored yogurt.

I just started making my own yogurt with a yogurt maker and it is fabulous! I initially was afraid of the work involved but it's easy (just a multi-step process). I use Carb Countdown milk and heavy cream mixed and the taste is very very creamy and consistency is a little runnier than the average LC yogurt but I like it that way. According to my calculations (I have a 7 cup maker, use 3 cups Carb Countdown milk and 2 cups cream) it turns out about 3 or 4 grams of carbs per cup, which is fine for me (about what the LC packaged yogurts are and I get 6 oz. instead of 4 oz.)

Tam

i have been looking for yogurt to eat but maybe now i will pass until i get to my goal...thank you

A new book out called the Four Corners Diet by Dr. Jack Goldberg (a biochemist) states that you can subtract 1 gram carb for every ounce yogurt you eat (if the label states 14 g. then 14-8 = 6 grams carbs to count).

The doctor said he demonstrated in his own laboratory that the carbs are reduced and goes on to to explain this in his book.

I don't believe the author has any financial investments in any yogurt companies (he even gives recipes on making your own), and the coauthor of this book is Gretchen Becker, a well-respected diabetes researcher who has diabetes herself. She wrote a best selling book on type 2 diabetes a few years ago.

Personally, yogurt has never stalled me and helps me lose weight, so I don't count the full amount and do the subtraction that Dr. Goldberg recommends. What do you think?

This is the scientist who started the whole idea of the "yogurt exception". Problem is no one else has been able to duplicate those results.

I believed this at first, and used to only count 4 carbs a cup of yogurt (plain). But the more investigating I did, the less plausible it seemed.

Now I count full carbs. But I must say - yogurt has never been a problem for me and I feel it helps me lose. I eat .5 cup day and have done since week 3.

On the Atkins site, there is an article that cites the benefits of calcium and weight loss.

I encourage everyone to give plain yogurt a try (I make a breakfast protein shake with mine) and see how you do. However, I would be skeptical of this claim. I'm also more suspicious about the flavoured ones.

Thanks for your input. I can't find any studies on this at all on the internet, so I started to have my doubts.

What really got me thinking is when I looked at a label of greek yogurt I bought. The label says 8 grams carbs. According to Dr. Goldberg's formula (see my post above), I can subtract the 8 grams, leaving me with 0! This just doesn't seem right.

I do agree that yogurt is healthy though, and will continue eating it. I guess anyone can write a book stating anything nowadays. What a disappointment.

I think Gretchen Becker herself laid this to rest when she said;

" Perhaps we should have said that "the carb content of yogurt can be as low as 4 g (even less in kefir)." The carb content will vary depending on the brand of yogurt, whether or not they've added milk solids, and the fermentation time. Read ingredients. If they thicken with cornstarch, or add fruit, obviously it's going to contain more carbs. If they add milk solids it's going to contain more carbs.

3. The length of fermentation to get the carbs down depends on the temperature. Commercial plants probably uses 37 degrees C or 98.6 degrees F, and they ferment until it reaches a specified pH. Dr. Goldberg's comments about "up to 48 hours" referred to fermentation at room temperature, which would take a lot longer, and he recommends fermenting until the process has stopped. The best test is to taste a little of the yogurt. I let mine get quite tart. There's nothing wrong with that. The acid slows down digestion, and when you sweeten with fake sugar, it doesn't matter how tart it was.
4. Danon's comment about only 30% of the lactose being removed refers to Danon's own methods. They don't say what they are. When asked how far the yogurt had fermented when it reached the store, one company said they didn't know. Because most commercial yogurts are thickened with cornstarch, pectin, or something similar because Americans like "custard style" yogurt, they don't care how far the yogurt ferments. Dr. Goldberg's comment refers to end fermentation, fermenting until it's so acid that the bacteria can't ferment any more."

http://forum.lowcarber.org/showthre...hlight=GRETCHEN

Unless you want to make your own and ferment it until it is "so acid it can't ferment any more" (and why would you do that!) then the 30% applied by Dannon seems the upper limit that can reasonably applied. I count all the carbs to give myself a safety margin.

Cheers,

Malcolm

Spirit, perhaps you should read through the thread which Malcolm linked to in his post. In fact, it's your own thread which you started about the Four Corners diet. http://forum.lowcarber.org/showthread.php?t=179143

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Doreen

Re this yogurt carbs thing, I found the following on the Yahoo Go-Diet forum, written by Dr. Goldberg:

"The measurements of carbs in commercial yogurts
are 8 grams per cup too high. This is because the
bacteria convert the lactose to lactic acid and consume
the carbs for energy just like we do. During the
fermentation the carbs drop by about 6 grams per cup and a
further 2 grams during shipping and storage.<br>I have
confirmation of those figures from Dannon for their yogurt.
The 8 gram per cup drop from 12 grams in milk is when
you make it yourself."

So even Dannon says you lose 8 grams per cup when the stuff has been sitting around for a while. However, if you bought some Dannon yogurt right off the assembly line---which is unlikely---it would contain more carbs. And I try to avoid commercial yogurt anyway because they all add carby things to the yogurt to make it thicker, and I don't need the extra carbs.

I think that rather than worrying about exactly how many carbs there are in yogurt, we should use common sense. Try it and see what effect it has on our blood sugar level if we're diabetic, what effect it has on weight loss if we're trying to lose weight, and what effect it has on stomach problems if we're lactose intolerant.

Then decide how many carbs you need to count to satisfy your own needs.

Gretchen aka Gritchen (Gretchen was taken)

Personally, I don't mind the extra carb or two, even if the label is to be taken at face value. As Jen said earlier, the benefits of eating yogurt far outweigh the carb count.

I eat about a cup a day now, and all seems to be going well. Also, I prefer the organic brands and like a bit runny, tart to sour yogurt. I add the runnier stuff to my protein shakes and eat the rest as one may normally eat yogurt.

And too, I tend to believe Dr Goldberg. Just because no one else duplicated his results does not make him wrong. I have not read one article debunking his theory/findings that said they used his proceedures. Nor have I read an article by anyone that spelled out how they reached the contrary findings to those of Dr Goldberg.

I take a lot of things I find on the internet with a grain of salt, and until someone does a study or two, using Dr Goldbergs process, and proves him wrong, I see no reason not to believe this.

A few articles I have read debunking this have referenced the standard method of counting carbs as proof that Dr Goldberg was wrong. How can that make sense? A few others make no mention of what method was used to "prove" Dr Goldberg wrong,only that he was wrong and so is his process.

Does this scenario sound familiar to anyone?

One lone voice in the wilderness does not always a crackpot make...how many people in the mainstream health field still think Dr Atkins was a crackpot?

Even if hard, repeatable science shows we are to take the label at face value, I will still eat my yogurt merrily and smile......