In this article, I want to show you how to make your own yogurt on the basis of my personal experience. It’s really easy and a fun to try experiment.
Why I made my own Yogurt
There are a couple of reasons on why I got more into yogurt. Some of them aren’t even related to yogurt itself. For starters, I’ve been experimenting a lot with different quark recipes and different types of brands. As I eat quark almost daily as you can see on my social media pages, I need to mix things up every now and then to keep it fresh, fun, and enjoyable. In the past, I also tried a vegan quark – check out my review – for a change. It’s a good alternative to your standard quark and they also have tasty pots of it mixed with fruit purée. But in the end, it was still quark and yogurt was a way to give a new taste and texture dimension to my quark recipes and my taste buds.
Additionally, I am someone who’s eager to learn how things work or how they are done. Once I realised that making your own yogurt is ridiculously simple I knew I just had to give it a try. So I went shopping the following day.
How to make your own yogurt – Base Ingredients
Two ingredients are all you need to make your own yogurt! Sometimes you’ll see recipes adding some milk powder, too. The key idea is to make the yogurt’s texture firmer. This is not really necessary unless you use low-fat milk and yogurt as starting base. Or when you really want a rather firm and creamy texture for your own yogurt. I wanted to try it without the powder.
How to make your own Yogurt: Tao of Stefan Style
Previously I shared on how to make a basic yogurt. You find plenty of further information in that article.
Here’s how I made my own yogurt. I got my ingredients ready, went through steps 1-3. As I didn’t have a machine but still needed to maintain the temperature for hours I had to get creative.
I put the containers into a cooling bag. They are usually marketed as cooling bags but they are just isolating the interior from the exterior, meaning they keep any temperature. In my case, they keep the heat. I put the bag on a blanket on top of my heating. On top of my bag, I placed a heating pad and wrapped it all up in the blanket.
As I had some space left I put another smaller heating pad into the bag. Every now and then (+/- every 2 hours) I re-heated the top heating pad. After around 8-9 hours I checked up on the yogurt. It seemed to be firm already, so I placed them in the fridge and let it cool down.
The following day, I gave it a try:
How to make your own yogurt
The yogurt was delicious and with my home made chili-strawberry jam, it was heavenly. The process was really easy but with the constant reheating a little annoying. Nevertheless, I was so impressed by the easiness and taste that I bought a machine or rather an isolated yogurt maker:
How to make your own Yogurt: Tips and Tricks
In the end, I want to share a few tips and tricks with you. As you saw it’s easy to make your own yogurt. You need next to nothing to make it.
- In order to improve the shelf-life of your product make sure you place them in a clean container.
- If you place them in separate glasses make them completely full. They should create a vacuum then and stay fresh even longer (but that doesn’t have to happen).
- You can make yogurt out of any type of milk (i.e. dairy or plant-based)
- Making quark or kefir is not very different from making yogurt
Most importantly, in order to make your own yogurt even cheaper than it is already:
- don’t eat all of your batch: take some 100g of it as the starter cultures for the next batch of yogurt!
This should work up to four times, thus increasing your return on investment dramatically. Take this return and use it for great primary products. The better the food you give your body, the better it will work and the better you’ll feel and perform.
Have you ever done your own yogurt? Share your experiences in the comments. I am really looking forward to seeing what you have been up to!
Pingback: Store-bought yogurts contain shocking amounts of added sugar - Tao of Stefan