Goatgurt?

I got a new yogurt machine this week.  It's a yolife machine which is great because I can make large batches of yogurt in mason jars or smaller ones in the little glass jars provided, there is one drawback, it does not have a timer so it will not shut off automatically.   As you may know I have recently become obsessed with Greek strained yogurt and I wanted to take it to the next level of making the yogurt with a goat milk and heavy cream mixture.  Goats milk has really great nutritional qualities, is naturally homogenized and is the closest milk to a mother's human milk that we can get.  
 My "goatgurt" failed - dare I say it was baaaaad,  but I have a couple of things working here and I am not sure which one of them it was that did not work.  First it's a new yogurt machine, I may have misjudged how long it would take to "yo" in a larger container (I used two 24oz mason jars each filled to the 2 cup mark) and I also did not bring the milk to a full boil and then back down to the temp the culture needs. I simply took it up to the temp the culture requires.  Well the end of the story is that the mixture never solidified after 14 hours and it did not have the yogurty smell that I am used to.  I took a little sip, it actually tasted really good so it was a little depressing that I had to dump it.


Today at the market we bought 2 pints of whole milk, it's not raw the great state of New York will not let us choose to purchase raw mile.  This milk is also not ultra pasteurized so the cream still rises to the top.  We tasted it and um it is really great and dare I say milky tasting, if you have had fresh milk form a happy cow lately you know exactly what I mean.  We are still on our search for raw milk but we will most likely have to go black market to get it, or buy a cow.......I somehow think our landlord will not be real happy with the second option.  With this milk I am going to take a second stab at a really good healthy yogurt on the new machine, if it's successful I will be trying the goat yogurt again and see if it's the actual milk or my new machine that is causing the difference.


As an aside, I recently had a fresh batch of yogurt which I strained.  I put fresh blue berries and maple syrup over......oh good god it was just delicious!  Move over honey - maple syrup may take over from here!!!!!


I will make the yogurt tonight and let it do it's thing.  More tomorrow on this little experiment.


Later
~CM