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Why pay up to $0.80 for a cup of yogurt when you can make your own easily? All you need is skim milk, a cup of plain yogurt or powdered starter (healthfood store or mail order) optional dry milk and electricity.If you have kids and they gobble yogurt up by the case, this handly appliance will repay you very quickly. If they insist on cups, save and clean the plastic ones from the store, or get small containers from the housewares department. Put juice-sweetened jam or crushed fruit and honey in the bottom and make home-made treats that are less expensive and have less sugar.
Why scald the milk? If you are using fresh milk, as opposed to the ultra pasturized tetrapacks (like Parmalat) you scald the milk to kill enzymes that can prevent the yogurt from forming. Why use dry milk added? The added milk solids make a stiffer yogurt. If you are going to make smoothies and yogurt shakes, don't bother to add the dry milk.
This yogurt maker holds a quart and doesn't have the goofy single containers that other yogurt makers have. A quart is a good size for a family. This maker will serve you well.
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I use this to make several quarts of yogurt a week. You can make yogurt without a specific yogurt maker, but it's a headache if you don't have an oven with digital settings that let you set the temperature very low. I never quite succeeded with any other method, but this seems to be foolproof. I plug it in, it goes on. I unplug it, it goes off. If only my vcr were this simple! So no, you're not paying for features, but features are not always useful anyway.Another nice thing is that you can throw out the silly inner container it comes with, and use a widemouth quart jar, or even a recycled quart yogurt container, to make your yogurt in, so you don't ever have to transfer it to another container.
You can make your yogurt with organic milk and at a price that is dramatically cheaper than buying it in the store (mine comes out to be 1/5 the cost of bought organic yogurt).
It also makes yogurt cheese almost affordable. Just toss your yogurt in one of those reusable coffee filters (Kmart and Target sell them) and the strained yogurt becomes very thick, a good replacement for cream cheese and sour cream, among other things. Try it in cheesecake yum!
Honest reviews on Salton YM9 1-Quart Yogurt Maker
I bought the Salton quart size yogurt maker and use it fairly often. Here's how I use it to make nonfat yogurt.» Place the Salton yogurt maker in a convenient but out-of-the-way location where it can run for a few days. Plug it in.
» Add one cup of nonfat dry milk powder to a gallon of skim milk and mix well. This makes the resulting yogurt thicker and more nutritious. (I've read that non-instant is better for this but haven't tried it. Any experience with this, anyone?)
» Heat milk to 185-190 degrees F, stirring frequently.
» Cool milk to 110-115 degrees F. (I usually use an ice water bath. Stir the milk frequently and monitor its temperature closely. This only takes a few minutes.)
» Stir a cup to a pint of plain nonfat yogurt with live active cultures (usually from the previous batch, sometimes from a commercial product) into the cooled milk. Whisk well.
» Decant the inoculated milk into the Salton quart container and four other clean wide mouth quart canning jars. Put the Salton container in the yogurt maker and the lidded quart canning jars in the refrigerator.
» Culture the yogurt to your preferred state of solidity and tartness. It's edible in a few hours but becomes stiffer and tarter the longer you leave it. I usually let it go 24 hours (no kidding-I like it tart!).
» When the batch is done, cool it either for several hours or overnight in the fridge or, if you're dying to eat it, more quickly in an ice water bath (no stirring!). At this point the yogurt is setting. If it gets jostled or stirred anytime before it's completely cooled its consistency will be looser and runnier.
» When you're ready to make the next batch (or immediately, to keep the ball rolling until you've processed all your quarts), put a wide mouth canning jar of inoculated milk into the yogurt maker. (I used to just take them directly from the fridge. It works, but the resulting texture of the yogurt is distinctly thicker at the bottom of the jar. Now I zap the milk on half-power in the microwave in 30-second runs, stirring between, until it's at 110-115 degrees F. It works like a charm!)
SUMMARY: The Salton YM9 has been a trouble free unit. The only improvement would be larger capacity, such as the Yogourmet machine has (though at more than twice the price). Knowing what I do, I'd buy it again.
