Yogurt Fail

I don't why I decided it would be a good idea to make yogurt at home, but for some reason I thought I would give it a try. I found a recipe from the blog A year of Slow Cooking, and I think I modified the recipe a bit too much. For starters, I cut the recipe in half because I didn't think I could eat as much yogurt as the recipe made, and my crockpot was half the size of the one described in the recipe. My next problem was that  I don't think I was able to keep the yogurt insulated enough--even though from the looks of my fancy insulation system enough heat should have stayed trapped:

Two beach towels wrapped around the crockpot after it tempered the milk for 6 or so hours.

I also used fancy dehydrated cultures, which seemed to half work. The recipe called for using plain yogurt from the grocery store for the cultures. There was some congealed yogurt at the bottom of my crockpot, but the rest of the milk I used didn't gel up into yogurt.

Fancy cultures...

I think it would be good to make your own yogurt if you could go through it quickly and if you ate a lot of it because it probably would save someone money. For me--I would not have saved money, and it wasn't worth the time to make it myself.