Making Yogurt at Home

In this post I would like to share how you can easily make yogurt at home. Yogurt is an incredibly healthy food with myriad of beneficial live bacteria in it. It is considered as a staple food item that you must have in your fridge in Turkey. The word itself which comes from Turkish is spelled exactly the same way in Turkish (except that the letter g is soft-g, which does not exist in English).

Yogurt goes very well with lots of different dishes. It is an excellent side-dish. It can also be eaten together with fruits, cereal, or on its own as a snack. If you mix yogurt with cold water and add a little bit of salt, you can make a healthy drink known as ayran (somewhat similar to lassi, an Indian drink).

In my experience, yogurt, especially if it is sour, does not resonate well with the taste buds of most Americans. I believe it is an issue of getting used to it. I personally enjoy yogurt which is on the sour side. But there are many Turkish people who prefer non-sour yogurt.

You can also make delicious soups from yogurt. Not surprisingly the most basic soup you can make with yogurt is called yogurt soup.

Ok, so now let's get to the recipe. To make yogurt, you only need two ingredients:

• Milk
• Yogurt

I know that this a recursive definition. To make yogurt, you need yogurt. But we only need it in small amounts (1-2 tablespoons) to use it as a starter. So after you make your first successful yogurt, make sure to reserve some to be used as a starter for the next batch. If you don't have any, you can try buying a starter culture if you can find it or use plain store-bought yogurt.

For milk, I suggest to use raw milk if you can find it from a dependable source. Raw milk may contain pathogens so it is important to boil it sufficiently before making yogurt. If you don't want to use raw milk or all you can find is pasteurized milk that's okay too. But I don't recommend to use UHT processed milk (the milk that comes in carton boxes and that does not need to be refrigerated). Actually, making yogurt is a good test to the quality of your store-bought milk and store-bought yogurt. If you cannot make yogurt using them, it most likely means they are devoid of beneficial bacteria and nutrients that help formation of yogurt.

Now let's really get to the recipe. The amounts below depend on how much yogurt you want to make. When we make yogurt at home for our family, we usually make it using 5 liters (1.3 gallons) of milk. You can make it with smaller amounts also. But stability of temperature is important as the yogurt develops. As this is easier to achieve with a larger volume, compared to a smaller volume, making yogurt, for example, with 1 liters (0.26 gallons) can be tricker. In any case, the procedure goes like this:

1. Heat the milk ensuring that you boil it for about 10 minutes if it is raw milk. Make sure the boiling milk does not overflow! To avoid this, you must closely watch the milk as it gets near the boiling temperature and reduce the heat to a lower setting. This way it will boil without overflowing. You don't need to boil it if you are using pasteurized milk. But make sure it gets hot in that case.
2. Let the milk cool to about 45 - 50 C (110 - 120 F). I never take temperature readings, but I took it for writing this post. At the proper temperature, you can dip your finger in it for a few seconds (say 3 - 5 secs), but you feel like taking out after that. Basically, it should be hot enough for the fermentation to take place but not too hot to kill the bacteria in the starter culture. Here is how looks like after it cools to the desired temperature:

1. If there is a layer of cream formed at the milk's surface (which generally happens), gently make an opening at the side.
2. If you want you can get rid of this creamy layer by straining the milk to another bowl using a strainer. But I prefer to keep it and eat it later on (after the yogurt develops).
3. For a 5 L (1.3 gallon) batch, add two tablespoons of yogurt from your earlier batch from this opening (or from the plain store-bought yogurt if you are making it the first time). For a lesser amount of milk (for example 1 L), it may be enough to use only one or two teaspoons from the starter culture. You can see it here:

1. Insert your spoon through the opening and gently turn it a few times. You don't need to (it is better not to) mix it too much.
2. Put a lid on your bowl. This lid must allow water vapor to escape. As the mixture is hot, there will be evaporation. So if you tightly close the bowl from the top, the vapor that will form cannot escape and will condense and drip back onto the yogurt. The yogurt may still form but it will be more watery than you want. Here is the lid that I use (it is earthenware - it absorbs water and is not tight so vapor can escape):

1. Next we must cover our bowl with a blanket or some kind of fabric that can wrap the bowl and keep it warm for at least 5-6 hours. One trick is to use your oven for this purpose. You can cover the bowl with a few kitchen towels and put it in a bottom rack of your own. Of course do NOT turn on the oven! This helps to create an isolated environment where your mixture needs to spend about 5-6 hours as the fermentation takes place. For example this is how I do it:

1. Finally, all you have to do is wait. How much you wait depends on the ambient temperature as well. For example a 4 hour wait in summer may have the same effect as a 6 hour wait in winter. I generally prepare the mixture before going to bed and take it out of the oven in the morning (7 - 8 hours later). Although this makes the yogurt on the sour side, we actually like it better that way. If you don't want any sourness, you should probably take it out after 4 - 5 hours.
2. After the desired time passes, take out your bowl and immediately place it in the frigde. It would be ideal if you let your yogurt sit in the fridge for at least 24 hours. This time allows the yogurt to become colder, thicker, and tastier.
3. Start enjoying your home made yogurt afterwards! If you had left the creamy layer on top, you can remove it now to a smaller cup to separate it from the yogurt itself. You can actually make home made butter from this creamy later -- this can be a topic of another post.
4. Make sure to keep your yogurt in the fridge. It will easily keep for two weeks but ours never last that long as we enjoy gobbling it up! Here is a final picture of a home made yogurt that we made in an earthenware bowl. Doesn't it look healthy and tasty?

Please let me know if you try this recipe. It may have sounded more complex than it really is. Doesn't take me for more than a few minutes excluding the time spent on boiling and waiting.