Yogurt Revisted, and Greek Yogurt

Since writing my yogurt post  quite a while back, I have continued to try to find easier ways to make yogurt. Not that it was that hard to begin with... I'm just lazy. And I really like yogurt. So I try to find easier ways to make it. Also, I have developed a love for greek yogurt... and good grief that stuff is expensive! I finally found some at Sprouts for $3 a quart, but still. Greek yogurt is an expensive habit.

So of course I set out to find a way to make it at home, cheaper. If you care what the costs come up to, read on. If not, skip this next paragraph.
I can buy milk for $2.60 a gallon at Crest, and I use about 1 quart per batch of yogurt. (I don't measure it exactly. I never measure anything exactly. I am so sorry. But that is probably not going to change.) So each 1 quart batch of homemade yogurt is about $.65. Not bad when you consider that a quart of store-bought plain yogurt generally runs around $1.50, if you're lucky! But even greater things are in store for my money-saving yogurt venture. When I strain my yogurt and make it into greek yogurt, I end up with about half as much greek yogurt as I had plain yogurt (1 pint). So, I can make 1 pint of greek yogurt for $.65, when the same amount of store-bought greek yogurt costs $1.50 at the cheapest place I found it! Plus, I don't just have greek yogurt, I also have 1 pint of whey that I strain off of it, which I use in place of buttermilk. Win, win, and cheap win.

So, now as to how I actually make it.
Because I am lazy, I don't like standing over a hot stove stirring my heating milk to make sure it doesn't burn... so I heat it in the microwave. The reason to heat up the milk to very hot is to kill any existing bacteria that might be in it, so that our introduced bacteria can thrive with no competition. So I stick my bowl of a quart of milk in the microwave for about 6 minutes, or until it is steaming.

Then, I let it cool down, so that when I introduce the new bacteria they don't get killed immediately. I let my bowl of milk sit with the microwave door open for about 40 minutes, stirring it occasionally. You want to be able to hold your pinky finger in the milk for ten seconds without being burned. But you don't really want it to get any colder than that, because it has to be warm enough for the bacteria to grow. If you are using a thermometer, you want it to stay in the 90-120 F range. (32-48C)

I then stir about 3 Tb of yogurt into the milk. This can be store bought yogurt (live culture), or the last bit of your last batch of homemade yogurt. I used the last of some greek yogurt I bought at Sprouts for this batch. I then put a lid on my bowl of milk, put it back in the microwave, and tucked a nice fluffy towel around it to keep it warm. My house was warm enough that this was all it needed to stay warm all night, but if you are worried about it cooling off, you could put a bottle of hot water in there with it. I did that over the winter. I have also put the yogurt bowl in a cooler with a towel and a couple of bottles of hot water. Whatever it takes to keep it warm, at about the same temperature it is now.

Then... leave it. The longer you leave it, the stronger it gets. I left my batch overnight, about 12 hours. (8pm to 8am). You can peek at your yogurt to see if it's where you want it. You want it to be about this consistency:

As you can see, it's still fairly runny, but it is more "yogurty" than "milky." (I'm all for the technical terms).

At this point, you can just stir this yogurt up and pop it in the fridge, and you have plain yogurt. But if you want greek yogurt, you have one more step. If you are going to make greek yogurt DO NOT STIR it. Instead, pour it into a strainer over a bowl. I use a yogurt strainer, but in the past I have used cheesecloth in a colander, or even a loose weave cloth napkin (serviette) in a colander. Place your straining yogurt in the fridge, and leave it until it is as thick as you desire. I strained this batch for 5 hours (until 1pm). This yielded a consistency pretty similar to store bought greek yogurt, and strained about half of the volume out as whey. If you leave it for longer, it turns into greek yogurt dip (or spread), and even longer gives you cream cheese! Of course, the volume continues to go down.

When it is like you want it, spoon the yogurt into a container for storage (I use a glass jar), and if you are keeping the whey (which I recommend), pour it into another jar. Stir the yogurt vigorously to break up any chunks and to give it a creamy consistency.

whey and yogurt

The whey can be used just like buttermilk (like in these biscuits). And there you have it! Yogurt!

Yum.

This recipe was shared on: Real food Wednesday, and Thank Your Body Thursday.

Multi-Grain Granola

One of the best tricks to cooking cheap whole food is using what you can find on sale, or is usually a good price where you are. Granola, while it seems like an expensive thing to make, can actually be a great price if you use the things on hand. The other cool thing about granola is that it can take a lot of variation. It is basically just roasted grains with some kind of thing to stick them together (honey, syrup, oil, etc.).

We love granola because in literally 15 minutes, I can put together a big batch that will last us for a couple of weeks. It is filling, healthy, and easy to grab a handful of for a snack. It is wonderful with yogurt, good with milk, and great just by itself. We use granola instead of store-bought cold cereals, which have so much sugar and preservatives in them and are just plain expensive. 

This recipe is one I have developed from the things I found at my whole foods store and local grocery for reasonable prices. You can substitute in whatever grains/ seeds/ nuts you can find. Make it as complex or as simple as you like. Think of this as an example... use your imagination to make your own!

I'd like to list the prices for you so you can see what I make this for... but I had all the ingredients in my kitchen and honestly haven't a clue what they each cost at this point. It has been a couple weeks since that grocery run. I can tell you for those of you in Oklahoma City that I got the oats as "old fashioned oats" at Buy For Less in Bethany, I got the flax, millet, honey, and almonds at Sprouts (63rd and May), and I got the puffed rice and cinnamon at Spices of India (39th and Portland).

Pick your grains first. As I already said, I used oats, millet, flax, and puffed rice for my grains. You can use as few as one grain (probably oats), or as many as you like. Think rolled quinoa, buckwheat, rolled spelt, rolled amaranth, rolled wheat berries.

Then, pick nuts. Again, you can do as few or as many as you like. I used almonds, because they were on sale. You could use peanuts, pecans, cashews, walnuts, etc. Also, think about spices. I just used cinnamon, partly because it was cheap and partly to keep the flavor of the granola simple since I already had so many grains.

Finally, choose what you are going to use to hold the granola together, usually a sweet syrupy part (think honey, agave nectar, maple syrup, molasses, sorghum) and an oil part (such as vegetable oil, olive oil, coconut oil, or almond oil). The more "clumpy" you want it, the more sticky stuff you add. For mine today, I used honey and vegetable oil. At the amounts I used, it does form clumps but they fall apart fairly easily.

Mix all your ingredients together, and spread out on a cookie sheet. Cook at a high heat, I did 400F (200C) until granola is nice and toasted. It cooks really fast, keep a good eye on it. Mine cooked for about 15/20 minutes. Then take it out, and let it cool at least somewhat on the cookie sheet before scraping it off. Cooling it on the sheet allows it to dry out and clump together some. However, if you wait too long to scrape it up, you will end up with quite a job on your hands, as it will probably stick!

There you have it! Granola! What I did was make a few small batches until I figured out how I liked it -- what grains, how clumpy, how sweet, etc. I would recommend you do the same, until you figure out exactly what you like.

Here is exactly what I used for mine today: (warning: this granola is not very sweet at all. If you want it to be sweet, add more honey or some sugar or you could always eat it with sweet fruit or yogurt.)

Multi-grain Granola (print recipe)
4c rolled oats
3c puffed rice
1c flax seeds
1c millet
1c almonds, chopped
1/3c honey
1/4c vegetable oil
3Tb cinnamon

Preheat oven to 400F. Mix all ingredients in large bowl. Spread on cookie about 1/2 to 1 inch thick. Bake for 15-20 minutes, until golden brown. Let cool. Scrape off cookie sheet and place in sealed jar. Keeps for a long time. 

Whole Foods

I find it funny that "whole foods" is such an expensive, upper-class, exclusive phenomenon surrounded by strange words and fads. True "whole food" is such a simple, obvious thing, that it seems to me that people must have to work very hard to make it so crazy and complicated. There is this idea that you either are a normal person who eats McDonalds and cheap frozen foods, or you are a rich hippie who can afford to eat vegan, paleo, GAPS, organic, raw, Whole Food, health nut stuff. I would like to argue that these are both silly and based on wrong assumptions.

Basically, the idea behind real whole food is that we modern folk eat abnormal things and this makes us chronically sick. This is true for several reasons, all of which fall under the heading of "we weren't made to eat this way." Modern food tends to:
1. Introduce chemicals
2. Process out nutrients
3. Kill all the bacteria

This is bad. First, we were not made to ingest so many chemicals. With the dyes, flavorings, preservatives, etc, present in our fast food, frozen food, canned food, packaged food, we are getting so many chemicals that we our bodies were never meant to process, and this causes our system to have to work overtime to try to deal with all this foreign stuff we are dumping into ourselves.

Second, processed food has so many of the nutrients taken out of it. White flour and white sugar are so processed that none of the original nutritional value of the things they are made from remains, and all we have left is empty calories filling up our bodies without giving us the vitamins we need. This is also true of pretty much any processed food -- the nutrients are greatly reduced or completely gone. Many times companies "add" vitamins in an attempt to make things seem healthy again, but these added vitamins are often in a form that our bodies cannot really absorb or use because they aren't natural (see above paragraph on chemicals). Our bodies store the empty calories as fat, and we gain weight while remaining malnourished!

Finally, we are obsessed with getting rid of bacteria. Bacteria are bad, bad, bad. They make us sick, they are horrible little germy things. We buy products to "kill 99.9% of bacteria!", and dump bleach all over our houses and antibacterial solution all over our hands. We also make darn sure that there are NO bacteria in our food. Now, of course, many bacteria are indeed bad. They do indeed make us sick. We indeed should take measures to avoid these pathogenic bacteria. However, what we have too often lost sight of is the fact that bacteria are also necessary to life! Our digestive system requires bacteria to digest food! These beneficial bacteria are called "probiotics" and we really need them. Unfortunately, the unnatural ways that we process food (such as feed lots) produces mutated really horrible bacteria (such as pathogenic E. coli), and we have to pump antibiotics into our food then to make sure we don't die. This virtually eliminates even the bacteria our bodies actually need to thrive and to work properly we have to replace them -- hence the popularity of fad/"whole food" probiotic things such as yogurt, kefir, kombucha, etc.

In a nutshell, these are some of the main things wrong with the way we eat. There are whole books written on the subject, degrees in the issue, and much much more to say and better ways to say it... but if you want to hear more, you can go read the books. (see the end of this post for a list of resources) Whole food, then, is basically the idea of feeding our bodies what they were made to process. This is raw foods (rather than over-cooked, which kills many nutrients), chemical-free foods (this is the idea behind the "organic" fad), naturally grown foods (eliminating the need for antibiotics since they don't have the mutated superbad bacterias that some abnormally grown stuff has), and non-processed foods (such as whole grains and non-sugary foods). Fortunately, you do not have to be rich to eat this way! I am a rather "poor" recent college graduate, and I feed my little family of two and a half (the six-month-old only counts as half, food-wise) on less than $200 per month, without growing a garden or keeping a goat or anything like that. We eat mostly whole food, and while certainly not perfect, I think that we eat quite healthily. We are not vegan or vegetarian or paleo or GAPS or dairy free or gluten free, or anything like that: we just try to eat real food. If I can make it at home out of all ingredients that I know, then I try to. This does take a bit of time in the kitchen, but I think the pay off is worth it!

SO, all that to say, I really think that eating "whole" food is well worth the time and effort, and does not have to cost an arm and a leg. I think that eating "whole" food does not have to take over or define your life. I think our diets can often accommodate a LOT of "wholification" (if I may make up a word) long before they become ridiculous.  I think it can be as cheap if not cheaper than "normal" food. And I'd like to prove it to you, here on this blog. Stay tuned. :)

Books/ resources:
 Note, the opinions in these books are not necessarily all shared by me. I think all of these people can get a bit carried away and sensationalist. Nevertheless, most of them do make some good points.

Folks, This Ain't Normal  by Joal Salatin. Talks about the "abnormality" of modern food. See: http://www.folksthisaintnormal.com/

Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser. Talks about the nutritional, moral, and social problems of modern fast food. See: http://www.amazon.com/Fast-Food-Nation-Dark-All-American/dp/0547750331

http://allnaturalfoods.com/ is a website about natural foods, diseases, and the relationship between food and whole health.