Homemade Yogurt
For a long time I’ve always wanted to stop buying premade and prepackaged foods from the store and just make everything fresh in my own home. I would take small steps every now and then towards that goal. Making my own baby food, once my kids were born seemed like a simple first step. After that I really pushed ahead. The past couple of years I’ve really dived head first into my goal. I spent several months making bread daily just to learn the technique and develop my own recipes. (My neighbors and friends received lots of fresh bread). At one point I started on ice cream. After months and months of work I have a lovely stack of my own recipes and I’ve made so many batches that I could probably make a quart of ice cream blindfolded.
With all of that being said when looking for the next item I wanted to tackle the next biggest packaged snack item we buy….YOGURT. We go through tons of yogurt. I was so hesitant to even try this because yogurt is SOOO hard to make…..or so I thought. Turns out, it’s so simple to make! I literally made 32oz of plain yogurt for $1.25 (normally I spend about $4). But besides all of that, it was a great science lesson for my kids and an awesome skill for them to learn.
Ingredients and Equipment
- 1 Quart Whole Milk
- 1/2 Cup Heavy Cream
- 1/4 Cup Plain Yogurt (with live cultures)
- 1 Pot
- Thermometer (like a candy or an instant read thermometer)
That’s it!!! Literally.
Instructions:
- Pour 1 Quart of milk and the Heavy Cream into a pot.
- Heat to 180° over medium low heat, making sure to stir so it doesn’t scald on the bottom.
- Take off heat and bring down to 115°.
- In a small bowl add the plain yogurt and stir in a few spoonfuls of the warm milk until it’s pourable. (this will make it easy to stir into the pot of milk)
- Pour mixture into the pot of milk and gently stir until combined.
- Place a lid on the pot and place it in a warm place for 8-12 hours. (See below for more information). The longer you leave it the thicker and tangier it will be. I like to leave mine for 10 hours.
So where am I supposed to keep this warm for 10 hours??? Good question. I have seen some people have a proofing box, a contraption that will keep things at a nice warm temperature. But I don’t have that, so here is how I do it without extras. First, I heat my oven for just a couple minutes on the lowest setting. I keep an oven safe thermometer in there to keep an eye on the temp. Once my oven is at about 120° I turn it off and turn my oven light on, which gets my oven to about 95° without heating it. I take the warm pot of milk and wrap it in a warm blanket and stick it in my oven. There are other methods out there, I have seen some people use a crockpot and one person used a cooler with some warm water bottles and blankets inside. Do a little googling and try it out! Find a method that works for you!
When you are eating all of your yummy yogurt, be sure to save some to use as your plain yogurt in the next batch! We have started scaling this recipe up and we use a whole gallon of milk at a time in a giant pot.
Links to my topping recipes:
