Home Made Yogurt

In our quest to make more of our food items from scratch, we made home made yogurt for the first time this weekend! Well, ok, really Eric did it, this was his baby.

I added honey, chocolate chips and dried cherries to my yogurt when it came time to enjoy it, yum!

We were both excited by how easy and inexpensive it is to make yogurt at home. Here is the procedure.

Bring 4 cups of full fat milk to 190-200 Degrees, do not boil!

Remove from heat and allow milk to cool to 120 degrees.

Whisk 2 Tbs store bought yogurt (with live cultures). We used plain greek yogurt for ours.

Pour in to jars and place jars in a  cooler. Fill the cooler with hot water (120-125 degrees) and put a lid on it.

Let sit for 6 to 8 hours.

Remove from cooler and put in the fridge.

If you want to make greek yogurt, which is what we did, you should removed the yogurt from the jars and place in a dishtowel lined colander. Set the colander in a large bowl and let the whey drain out of the yogurt for an hour or two. Then put the yogurt back in the jars.


We saved our whey and used it to make pizza dough that evening because we had heard it added a nice flavor to breads however we couldn't really tell any difference from our normal pizza dough. I also heard whey is good for your plants so maybe I'll try that next time.