When I was growing up in West Clare my grandmother used to make yoghurt. She didn’t make it all the time, but I have fond recollections of plain natural yoghurt with jam. My grandfather had a farm and even after he sold it we used to get fresh unpasteurised milk from a local farmer, so we had no shortage of fresh milk.
My grandmother had some kind of electrical yoghurt maker, though I’ve absolutely no idea what make or model it was.
30 years later yoghurt is part of my daily diet – I usually have at least one a day.
So I’m now seriously considering making my own.
The problem is that in 2012 there are a lot of different yoghurt makers on the market and they not only vary in make, model and price, but also in their basic functionality.
First off there are two basic types of machine available.
You can choose to either make a single large batch of yoghurt eg. a litre of it at a time, or opt for a device that makes individual pots. SKG models seem to be pretty popular on eBay and are incredibly cheap, though I’ve no idea how good or bad they are. Easiyo, for example, uses its own proprietary formula that you have to get from them. (Think of it as the Nespresso of yoghurt making – easy to do, but total vendor lock-in)
Choosing between those two types of machine is pretty easy for me. I’m not going to be making yoghurt to feed an army, so I’d get a machine that does individual pots.
But even when you’ve made that basic decision you’re still faced with a pretty wide choice of devices.
Some models have timers, some don’t. Some have an automatic shutdown, others claim to make the yoghurt faster than others etc., etc. It’s really confusing!
I’ve been checking out the features on a lot of the models available and I’m probably more confused now than I was when I started!
