I started making my own yogurt a few weeks ago. I had thought about doing it before, but I figured I’d need an incubator and a lot more time than I could spare. I also wasn’t sure what to use for starter or what I needed to do regarding sterilization of jars and milk. Would the yogurt be sour? Would it be too liquid? Lots of questions and no answers (though I could have asked Heather over at Simple-Green-Frugal since she’s been making her own yogurt for a year or so).
Over the spring semester, I took a once-weekly tutorial session on Japanese (日本語). Our sensei sings with me in the Brazos Valley Chorale and in the same church choir. She is vegetarian and makes her own yogurt. Somehow the topic came up and she offered to bring a couple of us starter from her own yogurt along with a brief description of what we needed to do to maintain it.
About once a week now, I spend five or ten minutes and set everything up to make a quart of yogurt: about a half-cup of starter from the just-eaten batch along with three cups or so of milk (about a 1:5 ratio of starter to milk). For this particular strain, I’m able to set it out on the kitchen counter for 24 hours and then stick it in the refrigerator. No mess. No fuss. No incubator to worry about. I just make sure the jar’s as clean as I can get it and it seems to work out pretty well.
That said, if you decide to make yogurt for yourself, make sure you follow the directions you’re given for the particular starter you use. Otherwise, you could have something else growing that isn’t good for you. The only reason I’m doing mine the way I am is because that’s what I was told to do from someone who’s been making their own that way for a long time.
Why bother making my own when I can buy it in the store easily enough? Making my own yogurt lets me put into it exactly what I want instead of having to read a lot of labels to see what someone else thought should go in. It’s also half to a third as expensive as the good yogurts that don’t have lots of gums and other additives—-and that’s even accounting for the time it takes me to make it. With it this easy and cheap, I tend to eat a lot of it. Besides, it’s pretty good. I use 2% milk and end up with a creamy yogurt that isn’t very sour at all. I never add sugar to it.
I tend to take my own lunch to work. Right now, I have a dozen bean, rice, and cheese burritos to eat. I also have a half-dozen cups of soup in the freezer to finish up. Along with this, I try to have a cup of yogurt and fruit each day. Between lunch and dinner, I can go through a quart of yogurt in a week.
Besides eating yogurt as it is, I also have been cooking with it. I use it in place of buttermilk in quick breads (now I don’t have to worry about buttermilk going bad because I don’t use it quickly enough). I also have made soft yogurt sandwich rolls, which are wonderful.
For more information, see Making Yogurt, a good general writeup on the process.
Good for you! It's so easy, isn't it? When I was eating yogurt (before I went vegan), I loved it plain, but if you want a fruity/sugary taste, just stir in a teaspoon of homemade jam - it's just like Yoplait without all the mystery ingredients and high fructose corn syrup.