(I mentioned that I was making my own yogurt and a friend asked how,
so I wrote it up...)

When I was a kid my father used to have a yogurt maker and he'd make a
couple of jars of the stuff every week... I didn't really like it then
because we were at war with mama - she wanted us to eat it au natural,
and we wanted to add a bunch of sugar... lol I've never enjoyed the
very sour taste of plain natural yogurt.But fortunately when you make
your own, you have the power to make it as sweet or sour as you like.

It's incredibly simple. All you need is a saucepan and a warm place to
put it. Your oven works wonderfully as an incubator... a thermometer
is an optional extra, as are jar/s to set the yogurt in. I've got a
bunch of glass peanut butter jars that I've saved for preserving, and
the big ones are the perfect size for yogurt.

You can use ANY milk and yogurt to make your own. Some people add milk
powder to their milk to make it even creamier and richer... this is
entirely optional, but the more milk fat and milk-solids in the milk,
the thicker and creamier the yogurt will come out. The only criteria
is that it has to be DAIRY - soy 'milk' or nut/rice 'milk' will just
make a mess unless you use a special process... the yogurt-making
beasties need dairy of some kind to work on. Yogurt is very low in
lactose because the yogurt-making beasties eat it up, but if you need
100% lactose-free yogurt you can use lactaid milk or one of those
milks that has extra stuff added to it to make it seem creamier and
richer than it actually is. My personal choice is to use plain
unadulterated 1% milk because that way I'm not getting any additives
in my yogurt and I don't mind it's being relatively thin - I put it on
my cereal in the morning. It also does not particularly matter what
brand of yogurt you use for your starter. Store-brand works just as
well as super-high-priced organic stuff. Once you have a successful
batch of yogurt made you can use your own yogurt to start the next one
and so on.

Now you have your ingredients, on to the yogurt-making.

Step One. Pick a time when you won't be needing to use the oven for
10-12 hours. The evening after dinner is great because then your
yogurt will be ready for breakfast. It's even better if you've used
the oven that day/evening, because it will still be a bit warm and
make a better setting environment - or you can turn the oven onto its
lowest setting while you heat the milk. Just don't forget to turn it
OFF again - yogurt needs to set at roughly 90 degrees, and if it gets
too hot it'll kill off the yogurt-making critters.

Pour your milk into your saucepan and bring it to the boil, stirring
it fairly often so that it doesn't stick to the bottom of the pan or
burn. A lot of recipes will say 'stir constantly' but that's really
not necessary. Use a medium heat and you only have to stir it every
four or five minutes. Just don't go away and forget it entirely!

Once the saucepan starts to boil and bubble up,THEN start stirring
nonstop. Boil it for 2-5 minutes or until it's in danger of boiling
over in the pan. Timing is NOT critical... Then take the pan off the
heat and let it cool down. You can either let it cool down by itself
on the stovetop (set the oven timer for 5-10 minutes so that you come
back to check the temperature fairly often). Or else you can set the
pot into a sink of cold water to speed up the cooling process. My two
quarts of milk took 30 minutes to cool down enough by itself, but less
than 10 in a sinkful of water. The milk is the right temperature to
continue when it is 110 degrees, or when you can comfortably stick a
finger in and say 'this is warm'.

You don't technically HAVE to boil the milk - it only needs to be warm
enough to make the yogurt-making critters happy... but the boiling
changes the nature of the milk proteins and makes for a thicker,
smoother yogurt. Since I'm using low-fat milk I want all the extra
thickening I can get.

When the milk is comfortably warm, stir in your starter yogurt - a
tablespoon or so of plain yogurt per quart of milk. Whisk it in well
so that the yogurt-making beasties are well-distributed through the
warm milk. From here you have two options. You need to set the yogurt
in some kind of container. You can even use the saucepan that the milk
was cooked in, but that'll tie up the saucepan for the duration (or
make for strange-looking yogurt if you spoon it out once it's set and
put it into a different container for storage). You can use any
relatively heat-proof bowl or container with a lid. I'm using recycled
jars because they don't cost any money and I have them handy.

Put your yogurt into the warm (NOT HOT!) oven, close the door and turn
on the oven light. Then leave it alone for 10-12 hours. When you come
back, you should have some nicely set yogurt with a bit of whey
floating on top. The whey is entirely natural. Just drain it off and
enjoy the yogurt! If you don't want to use the oven, you can use a
foam cooler with a heating pad and some towels... or you can wrap the
pot in towels and take your chances at room temperature. They made
yogurt in the middle east for millennia before the electric oven was
even dreamed of. But most of us have a working oven, and that's really
the simplest way.