I have been wanting to make my own yogurt for a while now. Why the heck would you want to go through the trouble to make your own yogurt? I have a few reasons.

1. I want it plain and sugar free.  Have you ever looked at a yogurt label? Unless it is plain it is absolutely filled with sugar. Even the vanilla is filled with sugar. Like if I want that much sugar I am going to do it on something really good and decadent, not yogurt.  And don’t get me started with the “sugar free” artificially sweetened stuff, I don’t f with artificial sweeteners.
2. I want to know where the milk is coming from. Plain and simple. No mystery dairy.
3. I had found a couple of brands that I was cool with but they all came in plastic containers. I felt terrible every week getting these big plastic containers that we can only reuse so many of. They all happen to be #5 plastic and that stuff is almost never recyclable ( my recycling won’t take it and I bet yours doesn’t either) so into the trash they went. That kind of waste was really bothering me.
4. My kids and I eat a lot of yogurt.
5. I am a food nerd who wants to be able to make everything from scratch. Not that I always will I just want to know how.

I have friends who have successfully used their Instapots or some sort of yogurt maker. Now, I have an Instapot but I just haven’t gotten into it. Don’t ask me why. I am not super enthusiastic about it. Maybe someday I will be but until then it sits in the small appliance graveyard closet next to the fondue pot. So the Instapot method was not on the top of my list and I didn’t want to go out and buy a yogurt maker. Luckily I found there are a ton of ways to make yogurt. You really just need a way to heat milk, a thermometer and a way to incubate it (aka keep it at a low warm temp for a few hours). As I so often do in these circumstances I just jumped in. Luckily one of my weirdo impulse buys at my favorite dry good store was a yogurt starter so I had some laying around. Apparently you can just use a couple of tablespoons of already made yogurt instead of a starter but that is not the way I did it.

What did I need?

1. Milk. I used whole, raw milk.
2. Yogurt starter. I used a powdered packet.
3. A pot.
4. A digital thermometer.

That and my stove and a spoon.

Check out the bite marks on the starter box. That was from Alex. Good thing I was buying it. I turned around at the store and found him chewing away on the cardboard.

Here are the steps I used. Like I said there are a heck of a lot of ways to do this. This is just how I did it.

1. Heat 4 cups of milk in a pot to 180F
2. Remove from heat and cool to 108F
3. Take out a cup of the cooled milk and whisk in one packet of the yogurt starter (one packet of the stuff I used was 5g)
4. Pour milk/starter mixture back into the pot.
5. Keep warm for a few hours. 110F-115F is the desired temperature range. I kept my in my oven on the Bread Proofing setting. I think that it was a little bit of a lower temp but it worked. At one point I had to take it out for about an hour while my husband used the oven to cook up a pizza and all was still well.
6. Stir occasionally to check on the thickness. The longer you let it incubate the thicker it gets. I let mine sit for about 10 hours.
7. Once the yogurt has the thickness and tang that you like just pack it on up and put it in the fridge. Done. You have now made yogurt!

The verdict here is that this was a success! I switched it out for our normal yogurt without the boys realizing. It was super easy to make. No more guilty plastic yogurt container dreams for me. Wins all around. I may look into those yogurt makers so that I don’t tie up the oven all day or I may take out that darn Instapot. For the moment though this is the way I will be doing it. Pretty sweet!

This morning I cooked up some peaches that I had frozen this summer with a little bit of honey. I served them with the yogurt and some granola that I had made a little while ago. I felt all wannabe homesteady nerd proud of myself.

Not too bad for a Monday morning!