Homemade Yogurt

For a while now, I've been wanting to make my own yogurt. I been postponing it because we really don't eat that much yogurt and I thought it was a huge pain.

However, as I was taking a look at our grocery bill recently, in the ever-present attempts to get it lower, I realized we were spending about $7 a week on yogurt. That's a lot, when your average grocery bill is around $80-$90! Ian frequently takes one of those individual serving Greek yogurts in his lunch ($1 each) and we were also buying plain yogurt for Ruthie, since she's started to enjoy it more (and not make such a tart face after each bite).

So, I called Sarah, who has already been making her own yogurt for some time, and asked if I could come over next time she did it. That happened about two weeks ago - I was amazed at how easy it was to do, even with small kids underfoot.

This week, I tackled the task on my own. Using a recipe and very easy to follow directions from thefrugalgirl blog* that I follow, I had the job done in about 30 minutes (not counting incubation time).

Here is my milk, getting hot on the stove. You're supposed to get it to around 185, which takes about 10-15 minutes.

Then you place it in the sink to take a cool bath, letting the temperature get back down to 120. This takes about 5-7 minutes.

Then you whisk in some starter, which takes about 30 seconds. Starter is just existing yogurt - I used what was left over from the batch I made at Sarah's house.

And here is my milky yogurt, ready in jars for the next step. This is half a gallon of milk - it make 5 medium size jars of yogurt!

Then you put the jars in a cooler filled with hot water to take a warm bath (yogurt sure likes a lot of baths). You simply close the lid and then three hours later...

You have yummy yogurt! Actually, it's a bit longer than that, since you should refrigerate it first so it gets firm (and cool - warm yogurt is gross).

This first solo batch is a little runnier than I prefer my yogurt, so I'll have to tinker with a few things next time. But we've already enjoyed it in fruit smoothies, with granola (homemade, of course), and Ruthie eats a nice big bowl of it every morning with her rice cereal.

Now let's get down to the dollar and cents of it - say each of my jars holds about two individual sized yogurts (I think they hold more than that, but just to be conservative we'll stick with two), that means in all five jars I have $10 worth of store bought yogurt. As a reminder, I used half gallon of milk to make all that yogurt. If the average half gallon of milk costs me $2.50, then I'm saving $7.50 by making my own yogurt. That's amazing! And so easy!

My thanks to The Frugal Girl for posting her recipe, Sarah for showing me the ropes and the good people at Fresh and Easy for selling me the milk. What a team!

*Disclaimer on the recipe - the frugal girl appears to boil her jars first. I didn't do that and neither does Sarah and we're all still alive. So I'm not sure how necessary that is. Just sayin'.