Fermenting Dairy at Home – Part 2: Yogurt

In Part 1, I talked about how kefir is a perfect, cheap substitute for yogurt in smoothies and baking, but it doesn’t quite mimic the real thing for fresh eating. If you want homemade yogurt... you have to make homemade yogurt.

I have been hearing for years how easy it is to make yogurt at home, but still it always sounded like more work than I was willing to do. Maybe the instructions I found seemed too wieldy, or maybe I didn’t have the right equipment and didn’t want to invest (which is a perfectly legitimate excuse). But eventually I realized that I did have all the right equipment at my disposal, and gave it a shot.

If you have never had homemade yogurt, and don’t have an easy opportunity to get your hands on some (in Saskatoon, Prairie Sun Orchard's homemade yogurt is available at Odla Market), go to the grocery store and buy a pack of French style yogurt. It is delicious and tastes similar to what you get in a home setup after 8-9 hours of culturing. It is also expensive and made in (locally non-recyclable) glass jars, so if you want to develop a habit of eating a lot of it, you may want to learn to make it at home.

While making yogurt has a few more steps than kefir, it’s still not very onerous. If you’re making small batches at a time (e.g. a 500 ml jar), it requires approximately 10 minutes of hands-on time.

During this 10 minutes, do the following (instructions for how to make it in a jar):

• Prep a tablespoon or so of starter culture – this can just be plain yogurt from the grocery store with no additives
• Pour milk into the jar you want to use to measure, and then pour it into a saucepan
• Heat the milk until 180F or just boiling (you don’t need to use a thermometer – just pull it off when it starts to boil)
• Cool the milk to about 110F – you can use a thermometer or a “finger test” – it should be warm, but not so warm that you can’t sustain touching it. To cool I put the pot in a bowl of ice water and whisk – 500 ml cools in about 1-2 mins
• Stir in the starter culture
• Pour the milk and culture into the jar

Culture for at least 8 hours. You can do this in an Instant Pot on the “yogurt” setting, or anywhere else you can maintain fairly constant warmth. I have heard an oven with the light on works well, likely any proofing setting your oven has, or even in a Thermos. Some websites say to just wrap the jar in a towel to hold in the heat, but I suspect those people aren't writing from somewhere that is -40. I use the Instant Pot for now but if I keep this up I’ll probably get a Thermos jar so I’m not working hidden electricity costs into my operation.

(Thick and creamy 10% yogurt! This picture is terrible! Sorry!)

If you use milk, your yogurt will be runnier than store bought. If you want it thicker you can strain the whey to make Greek style yogurt, or add a thickener like gelatin to the milk before you heat it, or follow any of the other ideas from that provided link. My method of choice is upping the fat content :D

Here are the notes on my personal experimentation over the past couple weeks of making yogurt:

• 500 mL whole milk only – 8 hours culturing – tastes good, barely tangy. Easy to eat plain. Quite runny
• 400 mL whole milk, 100 mL heavy cream – 9 hours culturing – these two dairy products are not homogenized, so the cream floated to the top during culturing and formed a skin that needed to be scraped off. Preferred the 9 hour taste, still very easy to eat plain, overall still very runny
• 400 mL whole milk, 100 mL heavy cream, ¼ tsp gelatin – same issues as above, gelatin did not make a noticeable difference
• 500 mL half and half (10% fat), ½ tsp gelatin – 9 hour culture – WINNER! It’s not quite Greek yogurt/Skyr thick, but definitely not runny, and much richer than straight milk. Will keep doing this!

Half and half isn’t cheap but goes on sale often enough that I should be able to get it for $3/L most of the time. For a higher-fat percentage yogurt, $3/L is comparable to sale prices at the grocery store (not counting the electricity costs of making it, though, which is why I’ll be looking for a Thermos).

Homemade yogurt requires more effort than milk kefir for sure, but it’s a different product altogether and definitely preferable if you like to eat yogurt for a snack or meal. Both are doable without specialty equipment, though with yogurt it might take some extra experimentation to find out what works if you aren’t using a yogurt maker or instant read thermometer. I think both are fun and rewarding, and taste a lot better than what you’ll buy from the store!