Human-incubated yogurt
by Nance Klehm
(you can imagine the why-for. this is the how-to.)
procure roughly one quart of raw milk if possible from any healthy lactating animal. if you don’t have connection to an animal, grocery store vitamin d whole milk (unfortunately homogenized and pasteurized) will do. it’ll need to do. you will need no more than a quart’s worth as a larger amount will make the process less comfortable.
you will also need to have a spoonful of room temperature yogurt saved from your last batch or some beautiful homemade yogurt from a wonderful armenian/egyptian/iraqi/greek/bulgarian/etc. grocer or neighbor. this is essential.
one half hour or so before going to bed, pour the milk into a saucepan and heat it gently and slowly, stirring all the while until it reaches 110 degrees. you do not want it forming a skin.
pull the pan off the heat and gently and slowly cool the milk to 90 degrees by just allowing it to lose heat.
drop your spoonful of room temperature yogurt into a jar and pour in the warm milk. screw on the lid and shake the jar once. wrap the jar tightly into a soft wool sweater and climb into bed alone or with animal or human companion. tuck jar against your skin. keep it as close as possible. hug or snuggle the jar: body heat is what allows the culture to educate the milk to become yogurt. bacteria colonize in the constant heat of your body/ies.
come morning, you should have a quart of human-incubated yogurt.
Arthur Magazine 
In Living on the Earth, Alicia Bay Laurel talks about doing the same thing, but different: you put the culture in a jar of warm milk in the morning and hike with it in your backpack all day. Then in the evening when you make camp, you can eat a yummy jar of yogurt by the fire. nice.
yes yes. yogurt that gets cultured when you walk with it… it would depend on the temperature of the outside air. so the where and the what time of year counts on this one.
This is great, Nance! I’ve been wanting to make raw yogurt but didn’t know how to warm it without a yogurt maker.
One thing I’ve been told elsewhere is that you don’t actually have to heat the lovely raw milk as high as 110 – a woman in Switzerland says you can just heat it to body temp and it will still firm up – it will just take longer. Raw people are always quoting slightly different temperature limits, but I think 110 is a little high for me and feel like body temp is a good one. So now I’ll look forward to combining her technique and yours! Thanks –
I would have thought that to get truly cultured yogurt though, you’d have to do your walking through the Louvre.