Anyone make your own yogurt?

[Major Nikon]

14. Adding powdered milk will make your yogurt thicker

There are a number of reasons why your yogurt can turn out too thin. Your starter may not have had enough active cultures. Your incubator may not be getting warm enough or it may be too warm, or you didn't incubate long enough.

There is nothing wrong with adding powdered milk. The reason I recommend adding powdered milk if you're using skim milk is because skim milk is made by skimming off the cream. Most milk manufacturers will add water to skim milk to make up for lost volume in cream. This has the same effect as adding water to prepared yogurt. It's going to thin it down. Adding powdered milk means you have more lactose and proteins per volume. More lactose and protein in the raw ingredients translate to thicker yogurt. If you are using whole milk or you just like thin yogurt, there's really no need to add powdered milk.

You should always scald the milk prior to making yogurt. This does several things. It re-pasteurizes the milk which helps insure that you don't culture bacteria that you don't want to culture. It also denatures the proteins which will help the yogurt thicken. The longer you hold the milk at around 190 degrees, the greater this effect will be. If you want thicker yogurt, I recommend heating the milk to 190 degrees (very low simmer) and holding it there for about 20 minutes. This gets a bit tricky to keep the milk from over boiling. A double boiler will help. I just use a big stainless bowl on top of a pan of water.

You should check the temperature of your incubator. Ideally, you want the temperature of the yogurt itself to be at least 110 degrees, but not more than 122 degrees. Remember that your incubator is not going to be effective until the temperature gets above 100 degrees. So if you put a cold mixture inside your incubator, it may take several hours before the yogurt temp gets above 100 and this is just going to increase the overall amount of time needed.

Here's an excellent guide for yogurt and yogurt making. It has some directions and timing charts listing thickness levels which you may find helpful. All the scales are in metric so you may have to convert if metric isn't your thing.

http://www.yogurtforever.org/download/yogforevuk.pdf