It worked! Yesterday, in a great flashback to my hippy-dippy days, I took it into my shaggy little head to try to make some yogurt. This was very popular among the back-to-the-earth set in the 60s and 70s, mostly because home-made yogurt allegedly would contain fewer contaminants than what you could buy in a store, and also because store-bought yogurt wasn’t the greatest. Nevvermind that you couldn’t get organic, antibiotic-free milk unless you had a cow in the backyard. As a practical matter, homemade yogurt tasted a great deal better than what you could get in a supermarket, where the best of a mediocre lot was Mountain High.
Today the yogurt you can buy is much, much better. However, the rage for Greek-style yogurt has taken over the world, and now you can’t easily buy plain ordinary boring yogurt. Sometimes you’d like the thinner product, though, to make soups like xergis and for blended drinks. Also, organic yogurt isn’t cheap, whether or not it’s been strained to resemble Greek yogurt.
Out came my old Laurel’s Kitchen, the standby of hippy-dippy vegetarian chefs. Laurel’s recipe for yogurt involved adding powdered milk — and not the instant kind. Not having any of that and having no idea even where to buy it, I moved on to the Moosewood Restaurant Low-Fat Cookbook, another back-to-the-earther standby. They would allow you to use instant powdered milk.
I have no use for the stuff and am not going to go out and buy it.
Those folks with the yaks on the high steppes, I figured, did not have powdered milk hanging around the yurt. It simply had to be possible to make yogurt without recourse to an industrial foodoid.
Nothing ventured, nothing gained. I picked up a half-gallon of hormone-free milk and a package of Green Mountain Creamery’s finest organic Greek-style yogurt. And here’s how the caper came down:
You need
• ½ gallon milk
• ½ cup good-quality commercial yogurt
Read the ingredients on the yogurt container. Be sure the product contains “live culture,” meaning the critters that turn milk into yogurt — and benefit your innards — are still bouncing around in there.
Gather Your Gear
• a large saucepan or small dutch oven, with lid
• a spatula or wooden spoon
• a candy thermometer or some decent common sense
• a wire whisk
• an oven that will heat to a very low temperature and that has a working light, or a heating pad, or a refrigerator that exhausts warm air in a place where you can place a stoneware bowl (in which case you will need a stoneware bowl large enough to hold ½ gallon of milk
oven thermometer, if you’re using the oven
• a sink or large clean pail
• ice
• cold tap water
• optional (see below): clean bath towel and large stoneware bowl
• clean containers to store the finished yogurt
• Step 1: Heat the Milk
In your saucepan or Dutch oven, heat the milk over medium heat to right below boiling. On a candy thermometer, this is 200° Fahrenheit. You really don’t need a thermometer, though. The milk has reached the right temperature when it begins to show a skiff of light foam on the top, especially around the edges of the pan — tiny bubbles form on the surface at this stage. Gently stir the milk as it heats to make sure the bottom doesn’t scorch and the milk doesn’t boil over. This step is necessary to prevent the yogurt from separating later on. (As usual, click on the image to see the details.)
Step 2: Cool the Milk
Dump a bunch of ice into a clean kitchen sink or clean bucket large enough to hold your pan. Pour in enough water to reach almost up to the top of the pan. Set the pan directly into this cold water. Stirring steadily with the wire whip, let the milk cool until it is just hot to the touch, 112°F – 115°F. It should feel more than lukewarm, but not scalding hot.
Step 3: Inoculate the Milk
Drop ½ cup of yogurt into the warm milk. Whisk it in well using the wire whip. Blend the two ingredients smoothly, leaving no lumps of yogurt behind.
Step 4: Incubate the Yogurt
Now you simply keep the mixture warm until it sets up into yogurt. The trick is keeping the milk around 110°F until it has set, usually four to eight hours. You can do this easily in a commercial yogurt maker, but it’s not at all necessary.
If you have an oven whose temperature will stay low enough, by all means use that.
If your oven maker’s idea of “warm” is somewhere around 200 to 250 degrees, you can still use it but you’ll need an oven thermometer. Once the yogurt is cool, put the lid on the pan and wrap the pan with a clean towel to insulate it. Place the oven thermometer inside the oven and turn the oven to the lowest heat offered. When the temperature reaches 115 degrees, turn the oven off and turn on the oven light. Place the yogurt into the oven, close the door, and go away. If the temperature in the house is fairly cool, you may need to turn the oven back on briefly to maintain the temperature — but be sure to keep an eye on that thermometer.
Alternatively, you can get a large stoneware bowl and pour hot tap water into it, to warm it through. Then transfer the milk into the bowl. Wrap it in a clean bath towel and then set it in the oven with the oven light turned on, or set it in the warm exhaust of a refrigerator, or set it on a heating pad set to “low” or “medium.”
My oven, however, will hold at about 100 to 115 degrees. So, if you have an oven with a “warming” feature like this, heat it to about 100 to 110 degrees. Place the pan in the oven, close the door, and go away. An oven thermometer is useful to help you keep an eye on the heat, but if you don’t have one and you don’t trust the oven, simply prop the door open slightly during the incubation. If the pan is very full and you have any concern at all about spilling milk in the oven, place a cookie sheet under the pan. I’ve found this is unnecessary, but just in case, it could avoid a clean-up.
Be careful not to jostle the milk too much as it’s incubating, so that it will set properly. This process will take from four to eight hours, depending on how tangy you like your yogurt.
The longer the yogurt sits, the thicker and more tangy it gets. After about four hours, open the pan and taste the yogurt. It should be creamy, like a barely-set custard, and the flavor will be tart yet milky. If you like it at this stage, pull it out and refrigerate it. If you’d like it tangier, leave it for another hour or two. I left it in the oven for about six or eight hours, producing a thick, zingy yogurt.
Step 5: Cool and Store the Yogurt
Leaving the yogurt in the pan or bowl you used for incubation, place it into the refrigerator. Once it’s completely chilled, transfer it into air-tight containers and store it in the refrigerator, where it will keep about two weeks. Sometimes you’ll find a layer of watery whey on top of the yogurt, just as you may find with organic grocery-store yogurt. Stir it back into the yogurt or, if you prefer, strain it off.
Et voilà! That’s it. The five-step process makes this sound time-consuming, but in fact it’s not, because most of the time the live culture does the work while you go off and entertain yourself with something else.
Since yogurt is getting kind of pricey these days, making your own has become quite cost-effective. After you’ve made it once, you can use your own to start future batches, meaning you never have to buy another expensive container of yogurt again. All you’ll ever have to buy is the milk.
We’ve been making yogurt for @30 years–think how much money we’ve saved! Think how much you’ll save going forward.
You WILL need to buy new starter now and then.
Yes, I’ve heard that.
My mother used to be able to make sourdough bread from wild-yeast starter. She also found that eventually you need to start afresh.
My first experience with homemade yogurt was years ago when a friend from Bulgaria asked me if I had a wool blanket he could borrow. He needed it to make yogurt following the process his family had taught him, and to him it was critical that the blanket be wool. He said wool would hold the heat in better for the incubation stage. Basically, he tightly wrapped the pot of inoculated milk in the blanket and left it in a draft-free area in his apartment. It was really good yogurt!
I’ve made yogurt at home following the method you outlined with cow milk and it was tasty stuff. However, I’ve found that this approach does not work so well with goat milk. My experience when making goat milk yogurt was that it was very runny. I thought the process had failed, but more research indicated that this is pretty common with goat milk. Sadly, goat milk dairy products are the only ones I’m supposed to consume these days. Since buying a half gallon of goat milk costs about the same as buying a quart of goat milk yogurt (and results in a less than desirable product), I just buy the yogurt.
I know what you mean about Greek-style yogurt being EVERYWHERE these days. Several months ago I found myself needing some supplies for a recipe, including a scant cup of yogurt. Since I was running some errands that would take me by a regional chain grocery I decided to stop there to pick up the supplies. The only regular-style yogurt I could find was a quart-sized container of Dannon. Since I knew I would not eat that much cow milk yogurt I passed on it and just abandoned my recipe plan. Every cup of yogurt on the shelf was Greek-style and fat free; most of it was sweetened and flavored, too, although I did manage to locate one brand with plain, fat-free Greek-style yogurt.
I found this super irritating, BTW. I think other shoppers were a bit disturbed by how much time I was spending in the dairy aisle picking up containers and making noises of annoyance!
Goat’s milk has a different composition from cow’s milk, from what I recall from some biology course I took back in the Pleistocene. I think…it seems to me it’s higher in certain fats. It might be that if you can find some goat’s-milk yogurt you might be able to get it started successfully with THAT product. Or possibly…what if you didn’t heat it first?
Those sweetened, flavored yogurts, Greek-style or whatEVER, are just gross. A lot like bizarrely flavored coffees.
PS: Here’s an interesting discussion of making goat’s milk yogurt: http://sunstonefarmandlearn.com/2010/07/28/how-to-make-goat-milk-yogurt/
Thanks for that link to goat milk yogurt! If I make goat milk yogurt at home, I guess I will have to either get used to thinner yogurt or add some gelatin or powdered milk to thicken. I don’t care for the super thick Greek style yogurt, but I do want a thicker product than what I ended up with the one time I tried to make it.
I don’t care for greek yogurt. I actually like my yogurt not as thick, so the greek stuff kind of weirds me out. Between the national brands and the store brands, I find that the stuff that Aldi sells is my favorite.
In these precinct, the Greek-style yogurt is kinda nice when you want a substitute for sour cream. Problem is, the low- and no-fat versions can be…uhm…ridiculous. Got one — don’t recall the brand off-hand — that had the consistency and flavor of ground-up chalk mixed with water. Trader Joe’s is probably the best of them, although I’ve found a few that were sorta OK in other stores. But if you have to buy full-fat to get an acceptable product, you might as well go with real sour cream!
What kind of milk – skim, whole?
For this initial flight, I decided to go with whole, just to see what would happen. Because some no-fat commercial versions have all the flavor and consistency of ground chalk mixed in water, I thought the best result would probably come from the high-test version. But next will try low-fat, and then if that works, will try skim.
This might be kinda fun to try, especially now that I’m trying to maintain a higher number of probiotics in my intestines. I wonder if the warming could be done with the low setting on the Crock Pot.
It may depend on the model you’re using. Mine, which is an original CrockPot brand (think the last one was a Sunbeam), gets pretty hot on the “low” setting. Meats will be at a full simmer after they’ve been in there for a while. You don’t want it to get hot enough to kill the critters.
After upwards of six hours in the oven, the stainless-steel Dutch oven I used was cool enough for me to lift it out bare-handed. Inside of the oven was about as warm as a summer day in Phoenix.
I made yogurt for years, when all the affordable commercial stuff was filled with odd ingredients, and was not live culture. The incubating method I used worked very well for me. I decanted the mixed yogurt and milk into smaller (pint) jars, and set them in a flat Pyrex dish on a warming tray, with water in the dish. A sheet of foil laid over the top to keep the heat in, set it on low, and it was done in about six hours. The advantage was that by not having to decant the finished yogurt, I was able to keep the firm ‘set’, without the whey’s separating out so early.
That’s a great idea! Today I need to transfer the stuff out of the pan, which has been residing in the fridge a couple days, into some jars and am wondering if that will make it separate. We’ll soon see! 😀
I use The Frugal Girl’s recipe and store the jars in a cooler with warm water to incubate. Whole milk makes the thickest yogurt but 2% works too.
Cooler idea is good, too. I think SDXB made off with mine.
I incubate it in a souffle pan covered with a large saucepan lid, atop an old warming tray that DF had in a cupboard. (A heating pad set on “low” works well, too.) My cooking time is seven to nine hours.
I let it sit in the fridge for six or seven hours, or overnight, and then take the next step: draining it through a piece of flour-sack dish towel sit in a colander. It is thick and creamy and slightly tangy but not at all sour.
The whey gets used, too. I make oatmeal with it (half water), stir it into soup stock or chili, and use it for breadmaking (when I remember).
I mix the yogurt with fruit or homemade jam and honestly prefer it to ice cream.
Voila! Home-made Greek yogurt.
The whey is supposed to be very good for you. It’s full of calcium, and it also contains phosphorus, and a slew of vitamins.
And speaking of the whey, if you don’t want to use it yourself, you can feed it to the dog. It’s very good for dogs, too.
There’s a really good cook book called Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon that uses whey in a LOT of things. The book follows the guidance of the Weston Price Foundation which advocates traditional practices like consuming bone broths, unpasteurized dairy, and whole grains/legumes that have been long soaked. Whey is used in a lot of the recipes and is also used a “starter” for lacto-fermented beverages and pickles. Her recipe for beet kvass takes time and patience, but it’s absolutely delicious. Unfortunately, I rarely have whey on hand (see my comments above about the challenges of working with goat milk). One of these days I’ll spend the time working through the various approaches to making beet kvass without whey, though. For all you folks trying to make yogurt, use your whey and don’t dump it out!
Slow soaked beans are much better than the USDA quick-soak method — they end up with a nicer, un-soggy texture and IMHO they taste better. And real, homemade broth is SOOOO tasty and also so easy to make.
But I would never recommend drinking unpasteurized milk. There’s a real reason for pasteurizing milk, and it ain’t to create vast profits for Big Ag. Parents of a dear friend of mine got that bug in their bonnet, all these many years ago. They gave their kids unpasteurized milk, and surprise! My friend, then about 6 years old, came down with tuberculosis.
In addition to having to be put through the lengthy antibiotic regimen required to clear the disease from his system, he had to undergo surgery to remove an infected gland near his face. It left an unsightly scar. All of his adult life, he’s worn a thick beard to cover the disfiguring scar.
There simply is no excuse to put a child — or yourself — at that kind of risk.
Yoghurt is blimming expensive here (as is all dairy, and, well, most food) so I tried making it myself a few years ago. Utter failure. May have to have a another crack at it though!
Did you heat it adequately? One site I read said the reason you preheat it is not to pasteurize it (most milk you can buy in grocery stores is pasteurized by the time you get it) but because heating it to just under the boiling point alters the proteins in it so that it’s less likely to separate.
No idea whether this is true, but it’s something to consider. Assuming it really is a key step, then a person would have to be sure to cool it down enough to keep from killing the yogurt critters but still keep it warm enough to make them happy.
Wanted to point out that I often buy the close-dated milk for 50% off to use for yogurt. Never had a batch go wrong, and it’s half the cost.
However, I’ve read you shouldn’t use ultra-pasteurized milk for yogurting. Apparently it doesn’t work.
As for the whey…Isn’t that what bodybuilders buy, in dehydrated form, to add to their smoothies? A couple of weeks ago DF and I made a smoothie to use up some very old fruit and I poured whey in as well. It had no noticeable effect on my biceps. 🙁
In Greece they eat it with a little honey also! SO GOOD
Honey’s good, especially with some walnuts or pecans. Also what’s very nice over it is maple syrup.