Learn How to Make Homemade Yogurt from Home

Why make yogurt?

You can easily make yogurt at home, and it is healthy, tasty and cheap. Yogurt boosts the immune system, and may help ward off osteoporosis and some cancers. When you make yogurt at home, you can put in exactly the amount of cream you want. Also, if you make yogurt at home, you’ll save money and avoid the additives of store-bought yogurt.

What you need to make your own yogurt

You don’t need a specific recipe to make yogurt at home. The ingredients are simple. You can make your own yogurt with some yogurt culture, milk, heat and patience.

Yogurt culture: When you make yogurt for the first time, buy some plain yogurt at the store. It must be simple, unflavored yogurt that contains active cultures. The cultures are healthy bacteria that help ferment milk into yogurt. You need about half a cup of the purchased yogurt to start to make your own.

The yogurt container will likely list the types of active culture. The greater the number of bacteria types, the faster your yogurt will ferment and the thinner it will become. To make creamier yogurt, find yogurt at the store with the smallest number of bacteria types.

After the first batch, you can use some of your homemade yogurt as a starter for your next batch. After a few batches, you may need to buy a small container of yogurt again for a full-strength culture.

Milk: Fat-free milk can lead to particularly thin yogurt, but you can add powdered milk to make the yogurt thicker. To heat and sterilize the milk, you will likely need to watch a candy thermometer. Some experienced cooks can make yogurt by estimating the temperatures, but this will take some time to perfect.

How to make homemade yogurt

To begin to make yogurt at home, heat four cups of milk to 180ºF for one minute (“guesstimators” suggest barely boiling the milk, then immediately removing from heat). Then reduce the temperature to 110ºF and mix in half a cup of the store-bought yogurt. Transfer to sterilized jars while maintaining the temperature. “Guesstimators” say it is the right temperature if you can keep your (very clean) finger in the mixture for 10 seconds, but that is a fairly subjective measure.

You will need to maintain the temperature for about six hours to properly make yogurt. Higher temperatures will kill the bacteria and lower temperatures will discourage the bacteria from doing its job. There are plenty of ways to maintain the temperature, and they all work.

You can buy a yogurt maker for about $140 or you can reach the same result with free methods. Some people make yogurt at home by surrounding the jars with warm water and putting the mix in the oven or a well-insulated cooler.

You can also heat a slow cooker on low for 10 minutes, then switch off, insert the yogurt jars and insulate the slow cooker lid with a towel. You’ll need to turn the cooker back on low for about five minutes every hour to maintain the temperature.

When your yogurt is finished, refrigerate and enjoy. Add fruit, sweeteners or spices just before eating and leave the rest of your yogurt unflavored to help maintain the active cultures for the next batch.