A while ago I wrote about how to make yogurt and how to make your own yogurt with 2 ingredients. Now that some time has gone by I want to let you know what I’ve learned and share my yogurt experience with you.

My Yogurt Experience: What I Did

In my previous articles I explained in detail how to make yogurt in general and how you can make your own with only 2 ingredients. This worked very well but for the sake of easiness and efficiency, I bought an insulated box that makes the production of yogurt much more convenient.

The use of this box couldn’t be easier! All you need to do is bring 1 litre of water to the boil. Then you pure it into the bottom of the insulated box. While you do this you heat up your milk to around 90°-94°C and then let it cool down. When the temperature of the milk drops below 50°C I mix together the bacteria with the milk. Other recipes say to do it at 40°C but in my experience, this works well.

I experimented with using yogurt as a bacterial base or actual bacteria. Both work fine. Besides that, I got some milk powder and played around with the quantities too. Adding 10g to 15g to a litre of milk gives a texture I enjoy best. You need to pure the yogurt base only into the small container that comes with the insulated yogurt box, close it, stack it on top of the water and close the box. Now you wait. Depending on the desired texture you need to let it work for at least 12 hours. I usually prepare the yogurt in the evening and remove it from the box the following day after I get back from work (i.e. 18-24 hours later). You can place the container in which you made the yogurt in the fridge and take out what you need.

I also played around with different kinds of milk and if you are into goat or sheep milk I really recommend you give this a try. In the grocery stores, both diary versions are rather expensive as a yogurt. The corresponding milk isn’t though. I made goat yogurt and my wife loved it. She added some homemade strawberry jam to it.

My Yogurt Experience: What I Learned

I only keep the yogurt in the initial container when I know I will eat it quickly. The main reason being that the container offers a big surface, thus a big opportunity to get contaminated with bad bacteria and germs. In order to increase shelf-life, I divide the yogurt in several airtight glasses and only open one at a time. Like this, I managed to make the fresh yogurt last for up to 10 days. Please be aware that the yogurt might turn bad. It’s a fresh product and ultimately even after only a couple of days could be bad. Smell it and taste a little bit before you use it. Better be safe than sorry.

That being said I only managed to create bad yogurt once. In this case, I was forcing it, as I kept re-using a part of the yogurt (100g) over and over again as a bacterial base. After doing this 4 times the latest batch turned bad within 2 or 3 days. I think that is a really great turnout as the initial base was almost 5 weeks old!

My Yogurt Experience: What’s Next?

The next part of the experiment will be in making diary free yogurt. I’ll try different kinds of milk, with soy, nuts and oats as the base. I’m already curious about the turnout here. I expect that for those batches I need milk powder to get a thicker (i.e. non-runny) texture as the kinds of milk themselves are very low-fat. But that’s only if my diary yogurt making experience can be transferred to non-diary yogurt making.

I would love to hear your thoughts about this!