Seriously — have you ever done a google search for homemade yogurt? There are so many contraptions, home-rigged options, and preferences, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone, somewhere, fills a hot water bottle with milk and sits on it for 8 hours, multi-tasking by making yogurt and cushioning a weary backside at the same time. It can seem daunting and complicated, but it is a simple process: introduce live cultures to a quantity of milk (i.e., add ready-made yogurt to milk), and let those cultures eat sugar and multiply by keeping them at a temperature they love: around 90º. That’s it.
The first yogurt I ever made was soy yogurt. I personally hate the stuff — even when I was dairy-free I couldn’t stomach the off-putting flavor — but when my allergic guy was younger, I was desperate to get any sort of corn- and dairy-free probiotic into his system. Since all store-bought soy yogurts contain corn-based stabilizers, I was forced to go rogue. The process of making soy yogurt was much more complicated than making it from plain cow’s milk; soy requires some sort of thickener, plus an additional sweetener, and it was even more important to make sure everything was sterile — so I was boiling objects in my kitchen for an eternity before I could even get started. Long story short, my son never really took to it anyway, and then we ended up getting rid of soy. But the biggest casualty was my desire to make yogurt; it was such a pain, I didn’t see myself ever doing it.
But I gave it another try at the end of last year. We had starting getting our milk, local and raw, from a cow share program at a nearby farm. I had been spending $3.50 on a quart of plain organic whole milk yogurt at the store, and we were eating a lot of it. My mental cash register (does anyone else’s head ding when making calculations?) figured out that two quarts of yogurt made from our raw milk would cost $2.75. That’s 39% of the cost of my favorite store-bought brand. I did a little more digging, and came up with a plan that now works quite well.
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