Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I heartily recommend this product. I do have one gripe which I will explain below, but 4 stars says "I like it" and 5 stars says "I love it" and I do love this machine. After reading the simple instructions my first experiment was to use yogurment bacteria powder and Avalon organic "standard" milk (1 liter). Standard milk is like homo milk where they haven't scraped off the cream from the top of the bottle - perhaps it has a slightly higher fat content (I don't know) but I wanted to see if there was a difference. The instructions say that you can assist the process by first heating the milk to 82c (180F) then letting it cool to 43c (110F). Additionally you can keep the milk at 82c for 20 minutes but I did not do the 20 minutes part, I only heated the milk and then let it cool. The machine defaults to warming the yogurt for 8 hours so I went with that. The reason that I love this machine, and its number one benefit, is that it automatically switches over to cooling after the warming time is over. This machine heats and cools the yogurt! This means that it frees me up to not have to attend it in the wee hours of the morning. I can set it before bed and wake up to yogurt in the morning. It turned out that after the 8 hours the yogurt was a little bit tart, but still good. I also purchased a Yogurt Cheese Maker which is a simple box with an inner sleeve that has a sieve/screen on the bottom, suspended in the box. Putting the yogurt into the Cheese Maker and leaving it in the fridge for 1 hour is enough to separate out a lot of the whey - leaving Greek yogurt! (my fave). The result, mixed with some blueberry syrup was simply wonderful. For my second attempt I used ordinary homo milk and I did not preheat the milk. I set the machine for an 8 hour heat cycle. At the end of the 8 hours I had ... milk. Leaving it for another 4 hours gave me... milk. After 24 hours I had cloudy milk. Hmmmm. For my third attempt I used ordinary homo milk again, preheated the milk ( I put the milk in the microwave for 4 minutes, stirred and removed the skin, then set it for an additional 4 minutes, I then left it sit out for 20 minutes to cool down), and set it for SEVEN hours of heating. In the morning I put the result into the Cheese Maker in the fridge (for an hour). The result is simply the best yogurt that I have ever tasted. I could eat this with no fruit flavour added. This is fantastic, I love the result. I will be making my fourth batch tonight - it will be ready for me when I awake in the morning. The whole point of this machine, in my opinion, is that I can leave it to heat for my set time and then it switches to cooling and awaits my attention. My gripe is that it should work without having to have the milk preheated. However, heating the milk in the microwave is not too difficult and the delicious results really make you wonder "what do they put into that crap that you buy at the store?"