mama urchin

I think everything I’ve made from scratch this week has been fairly obvious. Today, not so much. We eat a lot of yogurt around here — Papa and I both enjoy it with granola for breakfast and the urchins enjoy it for breakfast and snacks too. So, instead of paying for all that yogurt we make it instead.

You can make yogurt without a machine and you can make yogurt without using a powdered starter but you’ll have better success if you use both. We have an older version of this machine and my in-laws use this machine. The difference is mostly personal preference — our machine makes seven 6-oz jars of yogurt, their machine makes 1 or 2 liters of yogurt in one large container. As for the starter, you can use yogurt as a starter — similar to how you use sourdough to start more sourdough — just make sure it has active, live cultures. You’ll probably have more luck, though, if you use a powdered starter. We use the Yogourmet starter. We get it mailorder but I’ve also seen it in Whole Foods. Okay, so let’s make some yogurt.

Pour 40 oz ultra-pasteurized milk into a large measuring cup. Using ultra-pasteurized means you don’t have to sterilize the milk first.
Warm the milk to room temperature — I do this by microwaving the milk for about 2 minutes.
Add the powdered starter and whisk until it’s fully dissolved.

Divide equally among the jars.

Put the jars in the machine and turn it on. For 2% milk we let them cook for 15 hours to get a nice thick yogurt, for whole milk we cook it for 8 hours.

Put the lids on the jars and pop them in the fridge, voilà yogurt.
If we want fruit flavored yogurt we just add a little jam to the jar before we eat it but a lot of the time just granola is enough.

Organic Plain Yogurt = $1.00 per 6 oz. container
Homemade Plain Yogurt** = $0.46 per 6 oz. jar

(*Stonyfield Farm Organic Yogurt, ** $0.06 per ounce organic 2% milk, $0.83 yogurt starter)

Bread is an obvious choice for making from scratch. It really is easy and with a bread machine it is super-easy. We had a Breadman machine that we got a decade ago and last Autumn it started to make some very loud, not so nice noises. Committed to the bread-making I debated with which machine to replace it and finally settled on the investment of the Zojirushi.

I’ve had the best luck with the bread recipes that come in the manual with my machine — both the Breadman and the Zojirushi. We tweak them, of course, to meet our tastes but they have the right proportions of everything so they get the best results. If you are looking for recipes try this or this recent post or this excellent recipe and tip sheet. So instead of a recipe today I have some helpful hints for making bread:

• Don’t wholly substitute whole wheat flour for white flour unless you are also adding wheat gluten. White flour has enough gluten to achieve a nicely risen loaf, whole wheat flour alone does not. So, if you don’t want to add wheat gluten use a mix of white and whole wheat flour.
• Measure your dry ingredients by weight, you will be so much more successful if you do this.
• Store your yeast in the freezer, it will last much longer this way.
• While making bread machine bread is easy I still find myself avoiding it because I have to measure all those ingredients. Next time you make bread, measure the dry ingredients for two loaves (don’t include the yeast). Put one set of dry ingredients in the machine, the other in a zip-top bag or canister. Then when you want to make bread again you can just put the liquid(s) in the machine, dump in your dry ingredients, and add your yeast. Talk about quick.

Purchased Loaf of Organic Whole Wheat Bread* = $2.99
Homemade Organic Whole Wheat Bread** = $1.95

*purchased at my local Whole Foods
**price figured using this basic recipe ($0.35 per cup Organic Whole Wheat Flour, $0.09 per tablespoon Vital Wheat Gluten, $0.06 per loaf Instant Yeast, $0.75 for the oil, salt, and honey)

• 4 28.2-ounce cans of diced tomatoes (do not drain)
• 6 T olive oil
• 10 large cloves garlic, chopped
• 1-3 T kosher salt
• 1/4 c lightly packed dried basil

Heat the oil in a large Dutch oven over medium-low heat.
Add the garlic. Cook, stirring often, until the garlic is golden and softened (don’t let it burn), 5 to 10 min.

Pour in the tomatoes with their juices.
Bring to a boil over medium high, stirring frequently, and then reduce the heat to a simmer.

Add the salt (I start with 2 T) and basil and simmer, stirring occasionally, until the sauce has reduced and thickened. This could take as few as 20 minutes or as much as two hours. Mine usually clocks in around one hour, maybe a little more.

Now is the time to make this sauce taste the way you want. Before adding anything taste it first, you may need to add some more salt or even some sugar — if you use good quality tomatoes you generally shouldn’t need to use any sugar. We like garlic so I often add a cube or two of frozen garlic scape pesto from the summer. Chopped sun or oven-dried tomatoes would be yummy. Certainly any herbs you particularly love would be welcome.

The next step is to divide the sauce into your containers of choice. I generally go with zip-top bags filled with two cups of sauce — a jar of pasta sauce has just over three cups of sauce. You should get about 14 cups from this recipe. Let it cool a little and then off to the freezer and you’ll have homemade sauce for about seven meals. So to compare:

Muir Glen Pasta Sauce = $0.17/per ounce*
Homemade Pasta Sauce = $0.12/per ounce** (and it tastes better too)

*($4.29 for 25.5 ounce jar)
**($2.79 per 28oz can Muir Glen Diced Tomatoes, $1.19 per 1/4c jar of basil from Penzey’s, $1.50 for the garlic, olive oil, and salt = $13.85 for 112 ounces)