Easy-to-make recipes for great homemade yogurt that is healthy and delicious.

Making yogurt at home is surprisingly easy, and these homemade versions taste so much better than any brand available from a store. Perhaps most importantly, the home cook can control all of the ingredients, from organic cow's milk and soy milk from a farmer's market to ingredients found at a health food store or local grocer. Pat Crocker's recipes cover every taste and variation, from the sweetness to the thickness.

The home cook needs just three key elements to get started: fresh milk (or other liquid), live bacterial culture and temperature control. The only equipment needed are a stainless steel saucepan, a thermometer and a constant heat source or an electric yogurt maker.

The Yogurt Bible features 175 recipes: 35 stand-alone yogurt recipes followed by recipes that feature yogurt as a main ingredient or topping. These recipes provide endless ways to incorporate delicious yogurt into a diet or family regimen. The book features the basic method for lower-fat milk, soy milk, cultured rice milk, nut milk, fruit milk and coconut milk yogurts along with recipes for:

• French vanilla yogurt
• Strawberry yogurt
• Chocolate yogurt
• Caramelized pear and onion flatbread
• Tunisian carrot feta salad
• Mushroom and artichoke risone
• Zucchini and leek gratin
• Whitefish and vegetables with curry sauce in parchment
• Shrimp Creole
• Seared scallops in mushroom yogurt sauce
• Fettuccine with crab and shrimp sauce

The Yogurt Bible proves that making yogurt at home is easy, fun and satisfying, and the results are very healthy -- easily replacing commercial, higher-fat items such as sour cream, mayonnaise and cream cheese.

Pat Crocker is a culinary herbalist, a professional home economist and the author of seven cookbooks and three herb books. She lives in Neustadt, Ontario.

Par Crocker's profile page

One of the most concise and useful bibles I've read.

Montreal Gazette

Here was the book with the kind of detail that could have saved me a week's worth of culinary aggravation. And if you are really interested in learning how to make yogurt properly, this is the manual you need.

Winnipeg Free Press

Pat Crocker's The Yogurt Bible as a must have healthy cookbook. If you know someone who wants to eat more healthfully, make their own yogurt or would like to use more yogurt in their cooking, The Yogurt Bible would make a wonderful holiday gift.

This Mama Cooks!