If you don't already follow David Lebovitz's food blog, you definitely should. His recipes are great and his writing is funny. Sometimes his tales from traveling make me a bit jealous, but they're always packed with photos of delicious foods, so it works out. This summer I read a post by David Lebovitz about homemade yogurt that encouraged me to try making it one more time. I had tried making homemade yogurt in the past and those "yogurts" ranged from abysmal failures to things that tasted good, but had textures so unusual that we just couldn't make ourselves eat them no matter how hard we tried. One of them almost needed to be cut with a knife if you wanted to take a bite!
Peaches with homemade yogurt and homemade granola. Makes you miss summer doesn't it?
I used his recipe and created my first truly successful batch of yogurt in June, and since then I've made 21 other batches. Only two of those have failed, and the successes have been really great. The only downside is that now we are hooked - none of the commercial yogurts seem quite good enough, and they're all monstrously expensive compared to homemade yogurt, which only costs about $0.25 per pound.
I've made a few minor tweaks to his recipe, but the recipe that I've been using is not complicated. Since David Lebovitz's post gives plenty of detail, and I'm mostly just a fanboy giving him a shout-out, I'm not going to give very complicated instructions here:
Sterilize some glass containers with boiling water
Heat milk to 180 degrees F
Cool milk to 120 degrees F
Add 1/4 C yogurt per 4 C of milk. This is your starter culture.
Put milk/yogurt mixture into jars and keep them warm for about 10 hours, then refrigerate them.
Pretty simple, right? You don't need much in terms of special equipment, just a pot, thermometer, some jars, and a cooler. Other folks use different methods to keep the milk warm during step #5, but I've found that a cooler lined with beach towels works and is the most simple and reliable method. One of my terrible failures in the past involved using the oven to keep the milk warm...
I took some pictures and a movie during my last batch and they're below. Since I usually make one gallon batches nowadays, this is probably a bigger batch than you might want to try as your first shot at yogurt. I've tried using expensive organic milk (about $6 per gallon) and the cheap milk from King Soopers (which is from CO) and from Safeway (both about $2 per gallon). I really couldn't tell a difference between the two of them. My Seattle self is condemning me as an environment-ruining selfish jerk right now, but oh well! While you're figuring out which milk to buy, I should mention that we tried using skim milk or 2% a few times, but the texture was always a little strange, even when we added things like powdered milk (which, by the way, is expensive and makes homemade yogurt a bit less economical, if you choose to use it). Using whole milk results in a pleasing texture and flavor and is definitely worth trying.
Canning jars full of hot water. I put a couple of these in the cooler while the milk is cooking to warm up the cooler.
Heating milk
Cooling milk in an ice bath
The yogurt starter culture just before mixing into the milk! I like to mix it in with an immersion blender so that there aren't lumps. If this is your first batch, your starter culture is probably a commercial yogurt. I used Brown Cow Nonfat Vanilla as my starter culture because I liked its texture. Choose any yogurt that you think has a good texture and use a fresh container so that it has a higher number of living yogurt bacteria. After that first batch you can just use some of the yogurt from a previous batch as your starter, like I'm doing in the picture above. Your texture probably won't be the same as the commercial yogurt because basically all of them add thickeners like gelatin, pectin, guar gum, etc. that you probably won't use.
Adding milk to jars. In the middle of the video you'll see me spooning the froth out of the jars to make room for a little more milk, but you don't have to do this. I mostly remove the froth so that I can fit the maximum amount of milk into the minimum number of jars - after all, our refrigerator is already too full :-)
Cooler full of milk (soon to be yogurt!). The longer you let it ferment inside the cooler, the thicker the texture and tarter the flavor will be. I usually set a timer for 10 or 12 hours so that I don't forget and leave it in overnight. If you do that on accident, I think your yogurt would be fine, although it might be a bit more tart than most folks like...
You can strain your yogurt too if you prefer greek yogurt! I found this cheap plastic strainer at the local Mexican grocery store and it works great! If you don't have a strainer like this you can use a towel. We like to stir flavorings in to our strained yogurt - cinnamon, honey, vanilla, fruit, etc. Strained yogurt is also a great addition to lots of sauces and dressings, and when you make it at home like this it is practically free compared to the commercial equivalent!
So, I wrote a lot more than I meant to, but if you have any unanswered questions about the process let me know. Also, if you try making yogurt like this let me know how it goes!
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