crock pot yogurt

I stumbled across this idea for making homemade yogurt in a crock pot and I'm excited to try it.  This recipe comes from a blog called A Year of Slow Cooking.  It seems like a great solution to my cold weather yogurt making dilemma that I discussed in an earlier post.  I love my crock pot; it has the uncanny ability to make me feel like somebody else has cooked for me.  After many years of cooking for a family, this is very appealing. 

You'll need:
a 4 quart crock pot
1/2 gallon milk (whole works best, avoid ultra-pasteurized))
a yogurt starter ( that can be 1/2 cup of the last homemade batch, or 1 carton of  live-active store bought yogurt)
a heavy towel (I'm thinking a down throw for this climate)

Put the 1/2 gallon milk in the crock pot on low for 2 1/2 hours.
At the end of the 2 1/2 hours, turn off the crock pot and let the milk sit for 3 hours.
At the end of the 3 hours, spoon out 2 cups of the warm milk and mix it with the starter.  After mixed well, put back in crock pot, and wrap with your heavy towel for 8 hours/overnight.

In the morning, you will have home made yogurt.  For thicker  'Greek style' yogurt you can strain it.  Line a colander with coffee filters (or cheesecloth)  and spoon the yogurt into the colander.  Cover it and put it back in the fridge and when it is done draining, you'll have thick, creamy Greek yogurt.

I'm going to try this asap.  I like the way it dispenses with the bother of monitoring the temperature, etc.  The only issue is that you have to hang around the house for most of a day to do this, but that's part of the experience of these kinds of back to the earth make it from scratch recipes.  It'll go great with my homemade granola. (Weren't the 70's great?)
I'll update with the results.