I also spent three days with my family in my hometown, about 50 miles from where I live now. Christmas day, I spent with my wife’s family, and tomorrow, I will visit my extended family in the afternoon, and my wife’s extended family in the evening. Today, we spent some quality family time with just us and our two boys, and went to see “The Desolation of Smaug,” which my boys declared to be awesome and better than the first Hobbit film.
You can see that this Yule has left very little time for Heathen crafts and book writing. Never the less, I began my first project. This evening, I began making skyr for the first time. Skyr is a cultured dairy product from Iceland, consumed for over a thousand years. It is similar to yogurt.
I used a modified version of the recipe found here. The recipe is extremely easy. I am using 6 cups of vitamin D organic milk, which should yield a thicker product with no need for straining out whey or adding rennet for thickening, and 3 tablespoons of Siggis skyr. This will make plain skyr, to which I can add any fruit, honey, molasses, or nuts that I wish as flavoring. This is my own version.
The first step is to heat the milk to 180 degrees F, which for me is when the first bubbles that suggested boiling appeared. Next, let it cool to 115 degrees. I used an instant read digital thermometer to determine these temperatures. When 115 degrees is reached, inoculate the warm milk with the skyr, which contains live culture bacteria, and gently stir it in. It is the actions of these bacteria that turn skyr into skyr, cheese into cheese, and mead into mead. I transferred the milk from my sauce pan to a glass mixing bowl at this point, and with a paper towel covering it, placed it in the oven with the light on (not the unit!). Now, let it incubate for 5-10 hours (the longer, the tarter). I am going to let mine sit overnight and see what I have in the morning, and will place an update in the comments. It is midnight now.