What are your frugal and sustainable tips and tricks?

[Jenni Hen]

I'm making my own yogurt today. I make it with my own culture, which I've kept going from some culture I ordered online. So my only cost is the gallon of fat free milk (abbreviated FF milk, so I call it "loud milk."), and the honey I use to sweeten it.

I also drain a lot of whey out of it, so I end up with about a little less than half a gallon of yogurt, and a little more than half a gallon of whey. Which sounds wasteful, but I have a LOT of uses for whey, so I think of it as getting two products, not just one. I recycle the empty milk jug, and I don't have any other containers I need to recycle, as I use canning jars.

You do not need a yogurt maker. Don't let that be a reason not to make your own. If someone wants, I'll post my (somewhat lengthy) directions.

I used to take a jar of yogurt to work and stand my spoon up in it. I show it to coworkers and say, "Can your yogurt do this?" Then I'd turn the jar upside down and say, "Well, how about this?"

Yeah, I'm a bit of a smart aleck.

Uses for whey:
Mix with the chickens' feed to make their mash snack
Water blueberries or other acid loving plants
Cook rice
Make bread
Some people even drink it.

I remember when I was a kid: we used to go on holiday on a farm, and as I played with the farm kids I was treated the same - 'drink the whey it's good for you'! The only other use I knew for whey was for feeding pigs.
My bantams have mash for breakfast and I do sometimes make bread .

I used to save the last bit from a pot of live yoghurt and put it in a vacuum flask, warm some milk and fill the flask, then leave it overnight.
It's very easy to do, but I fail to resist eating all the yoghurt in the pot! We live near shops and it's even easer to think, 'oh well, I can get some more tomorrow!'.
I add soft fruit from my bushes, or the jam I made, or lemon curd (I lemon 1 egg 1 oz butter + enough sugar, mix up & heat until it sets)

I think I used full-cream unpasteurised milk, just because it's what we used to get, but I don't recall getting whey or a solid set as you describe.

We do make junket, which gives a sweet sort of buttermilk.

 

[Sally PB]

Homemade yogurt

I'll post what I do, with some comments as to why.

Needed:
1 gallon FF milk
Roughly 6-8 oz of plain yogurt, or purchased starter culture
5 quart canning jars, wide mouth preferred
5 lids to fit the jars, or plastic caps
Box big enough to hold the jars
2 bath sized towels
Pot big enough to hold a gallon
Large spoon for stirring
thermometer (a candy thermometer is accurate enough)
Fine mesh bags or cheesecloth

Rinse the pot with water. Do not dry it. The water film on the bottom helps keep the milk from scorching.

Put your starter yogurt in a bowl, and let it sit to warm up a bit while you heat the milk.

Pour milk into pot, and warm it slowly on low heat. It will take awhile for a gallon. Occasionally, stir gently, being careful NOT to scrape the spoon on the bottom of the pot.

Heat milk to 180-185 degrees F. The temperature is important, as it changes the structure of the protein so it can yogurt-ify.

Line the box with one of the towels. The other one is for wrapping around and covering the jars.

Cool the milk back down to 110-115 Degrees F. This is important too, as you don't want to kill the culture with too hot milk.

Pour the milk into quart jars, reserving about a cup for the starter in the bowl. You need five, as a quart canning jar holds a quart, but it will be full up to the brim, and you won't have room for the starter.

Mix the milk with the starter gently. Divide the milk/starter mix into the jars, and stir it in well. Put the lids on the jars. If they screw on, don't screw them down tight.

Put the jars in the box, wrapping the second towel around so that they are nicely insulated.

Go do something else for 6-7 hours. The longer it sits, the more lactose the starter culture will eat up, and the more tangy the yogurt will be. Longer does not make the yogurt thicker.

Voila! Yogurt. Very soft, kinda runny, not like store bought. (Read the ingredients; there might be gelatin in the store bought yogurt to thicken it, unless it's a "Greek style.")

To drain the yogurt:

Divide it into your mesh bags. I use 3 for a gallon, and I'd use a fourth if I could remember where I put it. If you don't have the bags, cheesecloth will work, but it's messier. Hang the bags with the yogurt over the pot or a large bowl to catch the whey. The longer you hang it/drain it, the thicker the yogurt will be. I let it drain for about an hour, usually. You can make yogurt cheese by draining it overnight, but put it in the fridge if you're going to drain it for that long so it doesn't spoil.

Dump the the thickened yogurt into a bowl, mix in some honey if you want. Store in pint canning jars or other containers, covered, in the fridge.

This is my least favorite part of the whole process:

Cleaning the mesh bags. Get them really clean, because, well, they've been full of milk. I don't know if you can clean cheesecloth clean enough to reuse. My bags are nylon, so they don't hold a sour milk smell. Hang them to dry.

I tried washing them in the washer. We have a dog. They had dog hairs stuck in the mesh, and I never made that mistake again.

 

[gtaus]

I have a couple of yogurt making machines. They make 5 or 6 individual cups at a time. About 10 years ago, I was making lots of delicious homemade yogurt. I ate one or two cups of yogurt a day. I loved to add in some frozen berries (we don't have fresh anything in Minnesota winters), sometimes maybe chocolate chips or something sweet.

Unfortunately, I had a really bad gout flare up around that time and could barely walk for weeks. I mean, it was really terrible. For whatever reasons, I associated the gout flare up with eating all that yogurt.

I put away the yogurt making machines after that and have never used them since. Reading the recent posts here on making yogurt made me rethink my assumptions. I now read that yogurt is actually supposed to be good for controlling gout, not the reverse. So, could it be that I was just going through a bad period for gout or maybe I was eating something else at that time that was causing the gout flare up? I suspect maybe so.

I cannot remember where I stored those yogurt machines, but I'll have to ask Dear Wife if she remembers where we put them. I know we did not throw them away. But lost in storage might be as good as gone.

Is there any "frugal" reason to make your own yogurt? I mean, does a person save any money by making yogurt at home? Has anyone compared the price of making your own yogurt to the cost of just buying yogurt at the store? Like I said, it's been 10 years since I made any yogurt at home and I have never done a cost comparison to store bought yogurt.

 

[Isadora]

Watch out, this happened to me, I saw an marked down item , and took it with me, at the checkout, it was about 30% more, I said it had been marked down, when they went back to check it, the marked down tag had been removed now every time I buy something marked down, I take a picture of the product and the marked down price!!!

We do that as well on prices that seem too low or reduced. Saves on having to wait for en employee to go confirm it was priced differently.

 

[Sally PB]

Is there any "frugal" reason to make your own yogurt? I mean, does a person save any money by making yogurt at home? Has anyone compared the price of making your own yogurt to the cost of just buying yogurt at the store? Like I said, it's been 10 years since I made any yogurt at home and I have never done a cost comparison to store bought yogurt.

I get 4-5 pint jars (so, roughly, 1.5 cups each times 4 = 6 cups) of yogurt when I make a gallon. A gallon of milk costs between $2.75-3. Not sure how much honey I put in it, and honey is expensive, so guesstimate 1.50 for the honey.

$4.50 divided by 6 is $.77 per cup, which is a full cup measure, not 6 oz like a yogurt cup. If I say 6 oz "cups," that's 8 servings, at $.57 each. Plus the electricity for heating the milk, but...

Anything else I might add, like jam or fruit, would be more of course, but I rarely do that.

I don't buy organic milk, it's just regular store brand. The honey, however, is local, strained, but not pasteurized, so on the higher end cost wise.

I'm pretty sure that is cheaper than the cheapest store brand yogurt I can get in that store, plus I know what what's in it. I did buy the starter culture, but I haven't had to buy any culture since, so I'm figuring that part is written off and free.

Here's what I really like about my yogurt. I don't know if it's the starter culture I bought, or if it's because it's "matured" in the months I've had it. My yogurt is very tangy, but it's also slightly fizzy on the tongue. That sounds weird, but man oh man, do I like it! Never gotten that in store bought yogurt.

 

[saysfaa]

...

Is there any "frugal" reason to make your own yogurt?...

Much, much less expensive than even the 32oz containers of yogurt (well, I don't put honey in it).

No container to reuse/recycle/store/throw out.

I'm sorry you've had gout issues. Tart cherries (both balaton and montmorency types) are a nice snack. Ten fresh or frozen or a spoonful of juice, for example. Any connection there might be can't be advertised by anyone with a stake in tart cherries because no one has paid the costs and organized proving which element is the active ingredient and that it is safe and effective as the FDA would require. At least one compnay tried to get around that by printing testimonies instead of saying anything directly and ended up with a mess including lawsuits. I stopped following it, though. I don't know how it ended.

 

[saysfaa]

Another aspect of sustainability is maintenance and mending. Both doing it when it is worth the time and materials and not doing it when it is not.

Inside example, My grandma thought I was wasteful because I didn't mend my socks when they got holes in the heels. Some day, I will make a second sock the same size and color as the first. Then, I think, it will be worth the time and materials to mend it. It isn't worth it for the vast majority of the commercially knit socks I've seen. They are too flat and fine even when new. It might be for a fluffy, puffly insulated boot sock.

Outside example... is it worth buying and applying a $7 can of high-heat rustoleum stove paint so the $2 55-gallon burn barrel takes longer to rust beyond use?

 

[FunClucks]

There's no need to be nervous about canning fruits and vegetables. The process is pretty straightforward, but you do have to stick to proven, safe recipes and don't modify them, or you could change the acid content.

Here are a couple of the best resources I've ever found:
https://nchfp.uga.edu/publications/publications_usda.html#gsc.tab=0
and
https://www.amazon.com/Ball-21400-Blue-Book/dp/B005SK6Y1Q#:~:text=Ball Blue Book 1 Each edition is filled,ingredients that make it easy to capture freshness.

I use water-bath canning for high-acid foods like tomatoes, tomato sauce, salsa, jellies and jams, most fruits, and pickled foods. I use pressure-canning for low-acid foods like green beans, corn, beets, spinach, turnips, asparagus, soups and stews. I haven't tried canning meat yet, but plan to give that a try this year.

Canned meat is delicious! Totally recommend it. Pressure can of course, I used the Ball Blue Book recipes, those are safe and well known. I like to can chicken - makes perfect chicken salad, shredded chicken taco meat, goes straight into soups and stews and just warm the chicken up. Tastes so much better than store canned meat. Turkey would probably work well too, I just never had any to can.

Canned ground beef does okay - use the low grease version if you can, otherwise you'll have to melt the grease out prior to using the meat. Best for adding into highly flavored foods - taco meat, chili, casseroles, breakfast scramble.

I don't care for canned fish at all. I like my salmon to taste slightly sweet and mild, once it's canned it just tastes gamey/fishy. I tried a few different kinds of fish and they all turned out that way. Ended up making "tuna" salad with the fish to make it palatable. If you don't mind fish that tastes like fish, you're good.

Have fun!

 

[FunClucks]

Another aspect of sustainability is maintenance and mending. Both doing it when it is worth the time and materials and not doing it when it is not.

Outside example... is it worth buying and applying a $7 can of high-heat rustoleum stove paint so the $2 55-gallon burn barrel takes longer to rust beyond use?

Depends on how much of the paint you use, and how long you extend the life of your barrels for, and how much time and effort it takes you to paint the barrels. If it takes 2 minutes to buy the paint while you were at the store for another reason, ten minutes to set up and paint the barrel, you use <$0.25 USD worth of paint, and it extends your burn barrel life at least a year, then it's worth it, right? Just guessing on all that, but if you use actual numbers, then you can judge.

 

[gtaus]

Outside example... is it worth buying and applying a $7 can of high-heat rustoleum stove paint so the $2 55-gallon burn barrel takes longer to rust beyond use?

Well, those are the types of questions I ask myself. For example, if I make a raised garden bed out of free pallet wood, do I really want to pay $$ for a pond liner to cover the inside walls of wood to extend the life of the raised bed - or would I be better off just building another "free" pallet wood raised bed if/when it falls apart?

I've got no hard answers, and usually just take it case by case. Sometimes I build things for short term use, and I don't want to invest any money into the project that is not needed. Other times, I build things that I want/need to last many years.

Same thing goes for me when I buy tools. For example, I might be building something and need a specialty tool to complete the project. If I have not needed that tool in the past 40 years, chances are I would not need it again in the next 40 years. In that case, I look for the least expensive option even if the tool is a one-time disposable use. As long as it gets the job done, I really don't care beyond that.

And since I don't make my living using tools, it's not worth my money to buy a contractor brand tool if a less expensive DIY/Homeowner tool will work just as well for me. For example, I bought in the Ryobi 18+ line of tools almost 20 years ago. Since I only use my tools every once in a while, I still am using my drills and saws from that first purchase. The only tool that I have "worn out" is a reciprocating saw that I use for just about everything out in the yard. And, technically, the switch is not working all the time and it could be because I found my dad going at that reciprocating saw with a screwdriver because he could not get the battery off (he was getting older, and his hands did not have enough strength anymore). So, he could have damaged it. In any case, it still lasted me almost 20 years until I had problems with the switch.

I only mention my Ryobi tools because they have promised to keep the battery format of their 18+ tools. So, my oldest Ryobi tool purchased 20 years ago still works today with my newest batteries. Prior to that, I had purchased a number of different brands that went out of business and you could no longer get a new battery after a few years. The tool was perfectly fine, but without a working battery, it is worthless.