Homemade Yogurt? Not a cost saving tip I want.

After a day in the lab I like to have a granola bar before I head to my car for the long drive home. I thought I’d try making my own to lower the sugar and add whatever I wanted to them (raisins = evil). I came across a recipe on pinterest (pinboards – something else I love) and linked to a blog to check them out. The granola bars were pretty tasty, and I’m still working on how I like them best (dark chocolate, pomegranate craisins, almonds, pumpkin seeds and sunflower seeds so far). The blogger had several other “make your own” recipes to help cut down on food costs – a must for a grad student! Some recipes seemed good, some like too much work, and I found one that I really really did not like – homemade yogurt. Her rationale for making her own yogurt was based on cost savings per year. I figured out that it would cost me $3 (plus time) to make my own yogurt each month, or $5 to buy a month’s supply of yogurt from the grocery store, if I continually bought it on sale. Net savings would be $2 a month – not really worth it in my opinion – you are growing BACTERIA AT HOME for YOUR CONSUMPTION. As someone that works in microbiological research I regularly grow several types of bacteria or mammalian cells in the lab. Do you know how easy it is to get some sort of contaminating bacteria (or fungus) in with your cells? There have been days that I have done nothing different, washed my hands, wore gloves etc and I find a new type of bacteria growing with my cells. I have no idea how it got there, and most of the time I can’t even see that there is a problem until I look under the microscope. With so many microbes that live on/in the average human, I wouldn’t want to risk introducing an unintended bacteria into my yogurt culture. Sure, there are precautions that she takes to prevent this, but is it worth the risk? And what if I make my yogurt and it smells “bad”? (a good sign of a contaminating bacteria) That entire batch has to be thrown out and started over, raising the cost of making the yogurt above the cost of buying it. In my opinion there are too many risks to making your own yogurt. I would rather spend the extra $2 a month on yogurt made by the “pros”. I’d can save $2 elsewhere and be confident that my yogurt doesn’t contain any extra, potentially harmful, bacteria.

C