Step One - Yogurt

The first thing I learned about the Specific Carbohydrate Diet (SCD) is that making your own yogurt is an essential part of the diet.

I guess there is not any substitute for the probiotic benefits you get from homemade yogurt.

Knowing that a putzy proccess for making yogurt would be my downfall, I invested in the most easy-to-use machine I could find.

The Cuisinart CYM-100 Electronic Yogurt Maker with Automatic Cooling.

http://amzn.com/B00ARSC1MK

I am quite happy with the purchase.  It automatically times how long you cook the yogurt, and then turns into a cooling unit to refrigerate the yogurt until you can put it in the fridge.

Basically, you can dump your yogurt mix into this and walk away for a day and come back to ready to go yogurt.

I have tried a few different batches, each one more successful than the last.  I prefer my yogurt super thick like Greek yogurt, so after a few attempts, I found the best way to achieve this is to cook the yogurt for a super long time.  18 hours.

Even then, the yogurt can be a little runny, so the next thing I did was purchase a strainer.

You could do this with a bit of cheesecloth to save money, but again, I wanted to do things the easiest way possible.  So I purchased this thingy:

http://amzn.com/B0091XNL0I

This is big enough to dump the entire 42oz of yogurt into and drips the extra liquid out.

The first time I tried the strained 18 hour yogurt,  I ate it with honey and some homemade SCD granola.

It was super delish.

I suspect that by straining the yogurt, I lose some of the beneficial probiotics.  But, I really didn't enjoy the first attempts of runnier yogurt that I made.  So, I am going to try the ignorance is best approach to this and tell myself that this is just fine.  The other benefit to this strained yogurt is that it can be used as a substitute for sour cream.  I haven't braved that yet, so I will post about it when I have gotten the courage.