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How to Make Yogurt at Home

Homemade yogurt is delicious - and it saves money!

We've been making our own yogurt for about a month now and we don't think we'll ever go back. Not only does it actually save us money, but the yogurt is seriously good. The method we've adopted is very basic - no special ingredients or fancy incubating equipment required. We had no idea homemade yogurt could be this easy!

Once you have the basic method down, there are all sorts of tweaks and changes you can make. Some people like to add dry milk powder or gelatin for extra thickness, others like to strain off the liquid whey for a dense Greek-style yogurt. Using different brands of commercial yogurt to culture the milk can also give you subtly different flavors and nutritional benefits.

We'll be talking about all this and more in the coming days. What's your favorite method for making yogurt?

What You Need

Ingredients

• 1/2 gallon milk - whole or 2% are best, but skim can also be used
• 1/2 cup commercial yogurt - be sure that the yogurt contains active cultures

Equipment

• a sauce pan or dutch oven with a lid - large enough to hold 1/2 gallon of milk with a few inches of head room
• spatula
• thermometer - a candy thermometer that clips on the side of the pan is best, but an instant read thermometer is also fine
• small bowl
• whisk
• an incubator - this can be anything from the dutch oven used to heat the milk to a commercial yogurt machine (more on this in Step 4 below)

Instructions

1. Heat the Milk - In your saucepan or dutch oven, heat the milk to right below boiling, 200°F. Stir the milk gently as it heats to make sure the bottom doesn't scorch and the milk doesn't boil over. According to the National Center for Home Food Preservation, this heating step is necessary to change the protein structure in the milk so it sets as a solid instead of separating.

2. Cool the Milk - Let the milk cool until it is just hot to the touch, 112°F - 115°F. This goes faster if you set the pan over an ice water bath and gently stir the milk.

3. Inoculate the Milk - Pour about a cup of the warm milk into a small bowl and whisk it with the yogurt. Once it's smooth, whisk this back into the pan of milk.

4. Incubate the Yogurt - Now comes the long wait period where the milk actually transforms into yogurt. The trick is keeping the milk around 110°F until it has set, usually 4-6 hours. Commercial incubating equipment is handy for maintaining a consistent temperature, but not necessary.

We've been incubating our yogurt in the oven with excellent results. First, warm the oven to about 115° (an oven thermometer helps to know when the oven is heated). Put the lid on the dutch oven or saucepan with your inoculated milk and wrap the whole pot in a few layers of towels. These will insulate the pot and keep it warm. Set this bundle in the warmed (but turned off!) oven and set the timer. It's important not to jostle the milk too much as it's incubating so that it sets properly - the temptation to peek is so hard to resist!

The longer the yogurt sits, the thicker and more tangy it will become. Check it around the 4-hour mark and give it a taste. The texture should be creamy, like a barely-set custard, and the flavor will be tart yet milky. If you like it, pull it out. If you'd like it tangier, leave it for another hour or two. We sometimes even make yogurt overnight, putting it in the oven around midnight and taking it out when we get up in the morning.

5. Cool the Yogurt - We have found that if we cool the yogurt in the same container we incubated it in, we end up with a smoother end result. Once it's completely chilled, we transfer it to air tight containers for easier storage. Sometimes there will be a film of watery whey on top of the yogurt. You can strain this off or just stir it back into the yogurt. Yogurt lasts about two weeks in the refrigerator.

Additional Notes:

• Cost Breakdown - We eat about a quart of yogurt a week in our house, which was costing us roughly $2.60 a week. A half gallon of milk makes a little less than two quarts of yogurt, which has been just enough to last us two weeks. We buy a local brand of milk that costs $3.70 per half gallon ($1.85 per quart), so we end up saving about 75-cents per week on yogurt. Nice.

• If your milk drops below 110° while it's incubating, that's fine. It will take a little longer to set and might end up a little looser, but the bacteria in the yogurt culture will keep the milk from spoiling. By the way, even after 8 hours in the oven (overnight), our yogurt was still 100° when we took it out of the oven!

• Once you've made one batch of homemade yogurt, you no longer need to buy commercial yogurt to culture the next batch. Just make sure to save 1/2 cup of your homemade yogurt and use that instead.

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(Images: Emma Christensen)

Awesome!!

That's a lot more fiddly than my method. I microwave the milk for 5 minutes, then check to see if a skin has formed. If no, then I go in one minute increments until it happens. Let the milk sit on the counter for about fifteen minutes in a metal bowl to cool to a bit above room temperature. Fish out the skin with a spoon (and eat! Yum!), whisk in a couple of tablespoons of the last batch of yogurt, strain (maybe, if I feel like it), and put it in the oven overnight. Let it sit for 8-12 hours. Done. No preheating, risk of scorching, wrapping, thermometers, or anything of that sort required.

Also, the best yogurt is made with barely pasteurized or raw milk if you can find it. And if you use non-homogenized milk you get this fantastic cream top that can be stirred in and seems to make it more creamy and delicious.

My one attempt at making yogurt at home wasn't a wild success - and the amount of energy (and time!) used to heat the milk and incubate the yogurt made me seriously question the cost-savings.

Don't get me wrong - I'm a rabid DIYer who cans tomatoes from her garden, bakes bread from scratch, etc - but unless you're using cheap homogenized milk, I don't see how this is time or cost effective.

I sort of agree that this is one of the more "fiddly" recipes - although, I've seen some that go into great detail! Frankly, I learned to make yogurt with a friend from Afghanistan and it was a super-easy, no-monitoring, no-stress way to do it.

I just whole milk in in a heavy pot (I use a LeCreuset dutch oven) until bubbles slightly break on the edge (~just before boiling), let it cool "until the tip of your pinky, when dipped, feels warm to the touch" (quite technical) - stir in some plain yogurt (few scoops/ about 1/2 c) and then I just wrap the whole thing in a huge bath towel and let it sit in the oven (off) for the day or overnight. It's always worked for me - maybe if I were using raw milk, I'd use a "real" recipe to be sure I wasn't throwing it down the drain later on!

It's so easy that I hardly think about the time it takes to heat, cool, stir & sit.

I'm all for DIY methods but this seems like a lot of work for saving only 75 cents.

Huh, just for the record -- I think you guys may be confusing "fiddly" with precise. This isn't any more fussy than most other methods online; Emma just went to the trouble to give actual temperatures and times.

People often complain about homemade yogurt being too thin; this precision helps get the thick yogurt most people prefer.

I've been making yogurt from a local dairy for quite a while. I follow the "recipe" from A Year Of Slow Cooking, and along with the 1/2 C. of starter yogurt, I add 1/4C. dry milk powder (NOT instant!), as I then strain it in a Donvier Yogurt Cheese maker. It's pretty convenient to just keep straining out the whey in the container. There's a more "pure" taste when you make it yourself - or maybe it's just my imagination! I just love it!
Oh, I forgot to mention that I use a Crock Pot.
It just doesn't get much easier!

The recipe I've been using calls for the addition of some dry milk powder to the heated milk. I don't know what the purpose of this is, perhaps the extra denatured milk proteins helps the yogurt set better ? A French colleague routinely uses half and half for his yogurt - seriously good stuff and distinctly detrimental to the waistline.

Switch on the oven light and it will stay warmer.

I've been wanting to do this for a few years. I cook lots of Indian food and go through a quart or more of yogurt a week. May finally give it a try, as this sounds really easy.

Wow, I had no idea - making yogurt always seemed really intimidating to me but after I read through the directions I think it's totally manageable! thanks!

I've been meaning to try this - we eat more than a quart of yogurt a week, sometimes, it seems - and with fall on the way, I'm much more likely to turn on the stove and oven (incubator). Bookmarked for later!

if it fails to set, which happens to me occasionally in the winter, you can actually warm it up again and add in more yogurt. a dried red chili pepper added on top helps too.

my method is simple too. i microwave the milk until it boils, let it cool down to 115 degrees, stir in 2 tb of yogurt and leave it in the microwave or oven (turned off) over night.

Wow-I love this post! I didn't know you could just save 1/2 cup from your homemade yogurt to make another batch--I thought you had to keep buying the commercial kind to get it going. Great news!

I also use my microwave to heat the milk, however I have a different method for incubating it: I leave my yoghurt jars (usually mason jars) overnight in a small cooler with about an inch of warm water.

Occasionally it's not yet set by the next morning, but a couple of additional hours always do the trick.

The beauty of this method is that the cooler can be placed out of the way (I leave mine outside) where it won't be accidently disturbed.

What about making soy yoghurt or other non-dairy yoghurt at home. Same basics?

Hmm, I agree with Faith. I've been making my own yogurt for quite a long time now and none of the methods mentioned here are any more or less "fiddly" than any other.

We're all doing essentially the same thing but some rely on visual cues or tactile ones and some like the accuracy of a thermometer. And clearly making yogurt is a very flexible process since you can get it done with a thermos, a cooler, a slow cooker, an oven, a heating pad, or a dedicated yogurt maker.

Also, I just read that if you use whole organic ultra-pasteurized milk with a yogurt maker you can successfully make yogurt without ever heating the milk. Pour the milk in with the yogurt and place in yogurt maker. I can't vouch for this method but I'm trying it soon.

In my experience you can use your last batch of yogurt to start the new one, but only for a couple times...I think there are fewer bacteria in each successive batch, maybe? Anyway, I haven't had much luck using my old yogurt over and over.

Also, I put the inoculated milk into pint mason jars, and then submerge them in a big pot of warm water on the stove. I put a steamer basket in the bottom of the pot and stick a thermometer in. When the water temp drops below 95 degrees I turn the burner on for a minute. I only have to do that a few times during the culturing process. This way I can make 4 or 5 pints of yogurt at a time, and because they're sealed until I open them I think they stay fresher longer.

mmm... what if you want to make vanilla yogurt? just scrape the seeds from a vanilla bean into the milk while it's reaching the 200f? or mix it when you had the yogurt and send it to the oven?

You can also heat the milk and the yogurt in a crock pot for two hours, then turn off the crockpot, wrap in a towel, and let sit overnight. I did this for a few weeks, but I ultimately decided that the time and dishwashing wasn't worth 75 cents

I've been making homemade yogurt for years not so much because of any cost savings, but because just it tastes so much better and provides more active cultures. Most commercial yogurts aren't incubated/cultured properly and then need fillers to make them thick. To get a thick yogurt that is also full of all the beneficial cultures and nearly lactose free to boot (the cultures eat the milk sugars), the trick is keeping right temperature during the incubating. If it's too cool the yogurt will come out watery and sour. Between 105-110º it will be thick, creamy and sweet. I found that wrapping a heating pad on low around a glass canister (or mason jar) and leaving it overnight keeps a consistent temperature and works perfectly every time.

My dad did this for several years going through a gallon a week. He placed his atop the fridge with a warmed blanket wrapped around it. That was when our now 40-year old kids were babies. The first words out of my nephew's mouth were, "More 'ogurt, mama." He dropped the practice for several years but when he contracted a rare stomach viral infection he started making and eating it again. The bug had plagued him for weeks, going un- and misdiagnosed. Within days of eating yogurt again the virus was gone.

This makes making yogurt sound complicated. My Turkish husband makes yogurt at home a lot. Bring the milk just to a boil, not boiling over, let it cool down a bit add a heaping spoon of yogurt and mix it in with the hot milk, cover the pot with a lid, wrap a tea towel around the pot. We do it in the evening. In the morning when you wake up the pot has magically been filled with yogurt.

This is basically the recipe I use successfully except that I incubate mine overnight on a heating pad (I put it in the crock from my crockpot and wrap it in a beach towel). I usually incubate for at least 8 hours, sometimes 10. I've also found that my previous batch gives varying results as a starter, so I usually buy a fresh cup of yogurt to start every new batch. It's very disappoint to wake up and find that your batch didn't yogurtify because your starter was too weak!

All that to save 75 cents???

I use the easy ="http://crockpot365.blogspot.com/2008/10/you-can-make-yogurt-in-your-crockpot.html">Crockpot 365 version...simplified here:

1. Pour half gallon whole milk in crockpot. Cover. Heat on low for three hours.
2. Turn off crockpot. Unplug. Do not uncover.
3. Mix 1/2 cup yogurt with one cup warmish milk to temper. Add this mixture to the crockpot and lightly whisk/stir.
4. Recover, and cover the "cracks" in the glass cover with a towel.
5. Let sit over night.

Done!

Very easy. Makes killer frozen yogurt, too...

you can just put it in the oven with the light on. you don't need to actually turn the oven on. i think that's what's throwing people and making them think it's hard.

I think people are missing the point here. The point is not to save money, it's to play with something that may seem unobtainable to others. I never knew how to make yogurt before, and well, now I know. And hey, if I can save a few pennies here and there along the way, awesome. And when you think about saving .75 cents, PLUS not having to buy a yogurt maker? you're definitely coming out ahead.

A biologist's perspective:
The purpose of heating the milk is to kill unwanted bacteria or fungal spores - so then your yogurt inoculation will supply the right type of bacteria, and only those will grow.
Bacteria growth rates will depend on temperature and nutrients -- this is why some people like the precision of controlled temperatures and times.

Heating can change protein structure, but generally this leads to curdling, which is not what you want here.

The bottom line is that there are many methods, all of which potentially work. My entire youth (1970s) I made yogurt for the family using a yogurt maker. I eat Nancy's yogurt, which is great, but this post makes me long for homemade.

Everybody - its easy and cheap --lets all just try it!

I just made yogurt for the first time ever, following this technique with outstanding success. I appreciated the precise instructions; would not have had the confidence to attempt it otherwise. After chilling the yogurt I also drained it overnight for a super thick, Greek-style result. Fantastic!

I visited a friend who served me homemade yogurt, but when I asked her how she just said that she leaves whole milk in a jar overnight. It tasted like yogurt, was a little more runny than the American stuff, and didn't make me sick. But before I try it myself, is this a safe method to make yogurt?

Yikes, $3.70 for a *half-gallon*? That's more than I spend for a whole gallon. The cost savings would be more substantial with regular milk.

Does anyone know how to flavor the yogurt with vanilla? The extract will kill the bacteria. I've been trying to figure out how to do this.

I posted this somewhere else but maybe this is the more appropriate place. I'm only ending up with 16 oz per 1/2 gallon of milk. How are you getting it so thick and not having to pour off/strain off any whey?

I make mine in a thermos, the kind you use to keep coffee warm. Lo-tech.

Just purchased a yogurt maker on Amazon and now I can make homemade organic yogurt as well as goat yogurt.

I just made this recipe exactly as instructed. For the 'incubation' I put it in a bowl that would fit in my crock pot (with warm water in the crock pot) and turned it on warm every now and then for a few minutes. I tasted it at 4 hours as the recipe says and ..... drum roll.... loved it!!! This is my first time making yogurt and I'm ecstatic with the taste and the silky texture. It tastes far better than any I've ever had store bought. I used Dean's whole milk and Voskos Greek Yogurt with honey vanilla bean. Thank you so much for this wonderful recipe! I'll be making yogurt from now on!

i'm woeking my third batch right now. what an amazingly easy and valuable guide. i create a homemade double boiler using an inverted metal plate in the lower pot to separate the cooking pot from the direct heat.

it takes about an hour to get the milk up to around 185/190° farenheit and then a couple/three hours to cool to 115°. if i let it go too long, it's easy enough to raise the temperature back to 115°.

i then pull a cup or so of the warm milk and do the whisk thing, using 6 oz or so from the last batch for the primer. i insulate the pot with a couple of towels and throw it in the lighted oven, setting the timer for six hours.

to consume, i mix in blueberry jam and prune butter (leave space at the top of your individual jars and you can eat it just like you'd eat dannon) and stir it up well. today, i tried lime curd from dickenson's. awesomeness defined!

For those who say that this is too much work to only save a few cents... you have to look at the big picture. You are making this yogurt fresh and you know what ingredients went into it, how clean your equipment was, etc. Personally, I love Greek yogurt but it's expensive in those little containers. Also, I hate the idea of those glued on foil lids. What do they use to glue them to the plastic containers? Whatever they use, the glue ends up in the yogurt.
Personally, if I could make this the way that I wanted, I would use fresh cow's milk from a farmer and buy some dried yogurt cultures. But the laws in this state do not allow farmers to sell their milk from their cows to buyers. Instead, we have to buy it as a plastic slurry in plastic cartons at the stores where it only lasts a few days. In cardboard milk lasts longer, but the cardboard is full of chemicals too. I try to stay away from chemicals and plastics as much as I can, I grow a garden--no fertilizers or pesticides, etc. But you can't escape plastics, it is everywhere, even in your carpet, bedding, and storage containers. Sorry to get on my soapbox...

I don't think of this so much as a "savings" issue as a "knowing what goes into my food" issue.

If you like Greek yogurt which I do, and where I live it's $5.68 plus tax for a QUART!!!!! A gallon of 2% milk is around $3.08 Walmart brand, Yes, hate store bought milk, but if you only have to pay that one time fee for a 1/2 cup store bought UNSWEETENED yogurt starter, and $.75 cents for a Qt. of milk which makes your yogurt cost .75 cents compared to $5.60 your not saving .75 cents!!!!! your saving $4.85. I add about a 1/2 cup of half and half, Fat by the way doesn't make fat, Processed white sugar, flour, fake fat, like oil heated to over 200 degrees which turns into plastic makes fat. Yogurt if done right, gives you all the necessary Bacteria you need to eat all the unhealthy sugars you might eat that make bad bacteria that put toxins in your blood AND bad bacteria will make all your sugars grow and cause yeast toxins which will cause you to bloat and get sick twice as fast. Also what you might keep in mind is store bought yogurt with tons of sugar and boiled fruit is not good and counter productive. If you like it sweet, add some Organic Raw Unpasteurized Honey, and fresh or frozen fruit. YUM. So the health benefits of yogurt far outweigh the time of making it. Oh and I used to work at Nancy's yogurt and I loved their yogurt!!!! Proud to work for them.