I've been making my own yogurt for the past couple of years, and not only is it much tastier than store bought yogurt, it's also much cheaper. At my local supermarket, an 8-ounce cup of yogurt costs $1. That adds up to $16 for a gallon of yogurt. At the same supermarket, one gallon of low fat organic milk costs $4.
Because I'm a yogurt lover (and a believer in the power of probiotics: bacteria that is good for your immune system) I usually eat three cups of home-made yogurt a day. That translates to a savings of $2.25 a day, or $67.50 a month. That means my $43 yogurt maker (a Waring Pro YM350) paid for itself in under a month. Even if you don't eat as much yogurt as I do, I recommend that you try making it yourself, because it is so easy, and even fun, to make your own.
How to make yogurt:
1. Pour 4-6 cups of low fat milk into a microwave-proof glass mixing bowl, and heat it until the milk begins to boil. (Boiling changes the milk's composition so that it will solidify when mixed with the starter culture.) If a skin forms on top of the milk, that's a good sign that you boiled it enough.
2. Let the milk cool down to the point where you can tolerate holding your hand against the bowl. Remove the milk skin and discard. Add one tablespoon of your previous batch of yogurt (or plain store bought yogurt if you are just starting out) and mix it with a whisk. Resist the temptation to add more starter yogurt to the mix in an attempt to speed up the process. It will paradoxically slow down the fermentation (I've read that too much starter crowds out the bacteria from doing its job).
3. Pour the yogurt into 8- or 16-ounce containers. Do not put the lids on yet. If you have an older-style oven with a pilot light, you can stick the glass jars in there and allow the warm oven to act as an incubator. Otherwise, you can use a yogurt maker or use a seed-starter warming pad to ferment the milk into yogurt.
4. Wait 8-10 hours, then screw the lids onto the jars and put them in the refrigerator. I like to mix my yogurt with nuts, blueberries, and honey from my beehive. My kids love yogurt, banana, and berry smoothies.
Mark Frauenfelder Credit.com contributor, editor-in-chief of MAKE magazine and the founder of the popular site Boing Boing, Mark was an editor at Wired from 1993-1998 and is the founding editor of Wired Online. He covers creative DIY projects and how-tos that will help you make the most of your money.
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Couple points here.
1) Nice article, I find the idea of home made yogurt interesting, and something I might try.
2) What expensive yogurt do you buy that costs $18.00 a gallon? Store brand will run you half that (or better with coupons or bulk shopping). You would still save money, but not nearly as much as you calculate out.
3) Your calculation/savings isn’t broadly useful, since it applies to people that eat what is frankly a crazy amount of yogurt. I eat about a cup a day (I buy Trader Joe’s Greek Style Yogurt, which fits my budget well). And imagine that tripling that would make me sick. (Also, since the point of probiotics is eating live cultures, I don’t know if eating three times as much would have a noticeable impact.)
4) You calculate that 1 gallon milk = 1 gallon yogurt, but you specifically state that you are discarding some of the milk. Does the yogurt inflate or something? It seems that the 1 gallon to 1 gallon assumption won’t hold up.
So, looking at this, I think that it is a great way to possibly save some money, and an interesting hobby. However, most people will not experience the savings you have. Moving from a more common diet of one or fewer cups of yogurt a day, and comparing it to less expensive yogurts, a savings of under $10.00 a month is much more likely.
Sorry to double post. Can you tell us where you bought your yogurt maker, I can only find it for 100.00 online (other than ebay, which seems iffy).
Hi Thad. Thanks for your comments! To answer your questions and comments:
The yogurt at Whole Foods (where I shop) costs at least $1 per cup. Some is even more expensive.
I eat 3 cups a day, usually. It’s kind of a staple for me. My wife has at least one cup a day, and my kids probably have one cup per day in their smoothies. So we often consume over a quart of yogurt a day.
Maybe I wrote something that was confusing, but I do not discard any of the milk (other than a trivial amount that turns to “skin” while boiling”). One gallon of milk = One gallon of yogurt.
The price of the yogurt maker has jumped since I bought it, and jumped again since I posted this piece. I suggest you shop around.
Good luck, and let me know how your yogurt making goes!
– Mark
Hi Mark,
Thanks as always for your great tips! This one looks great, as my son and I both love yogurt. I want to try this out, but I don’t want to buy a new yogurt maker.
Then I remembered the time my wife and I tried using our slow cooker on low to make chili. After a day of hard work hoping to come home to a tender home cooked meal we instead found a mold terrarium.
Anyway, I was wondering what you thought about using a slow cooker on low to ferment the milk, then jar it.
(Granted there is only one way to find out for sure )
Thanks.
p.s. a pretty big crab apple tree fell in my back yard and I hope to turn at least some of it into a spoon
I have used my slow cooker to make yogurt and it was good. A web search turned up lots of tutorials, I just picked a seemingly easy one and followed the directions.
Save even more money if you don’t buy an expensive yogurt machine.
Don’t need it to make yogurt. A microwave and an insulated cooler will do the trick.
I started making my own yogurt about 6 months ago and I haven’t looked back since. Store-bought plain yogurt always had a bitter and acidic taste to it, but the yogurt I make on my own doesn’t have that. It’s great to have delicious yogurt on hand that isn’t filled with sugar just to be edible.
I like using the 2-qt Euro Cuisine model so I don’t have to clean several cups after I make a batch I tried several times to make yogurt without a maker, but the effort and time involved in temperature regulation far outweighs the initial cost of one. Yogurt makers keep the yogurt at the exact temperature for as long as you want. Slow cookers can work, but I wouldn’t recommend it. Even if they stay at the right temperature for the short term, they get too hot and stop the yogurt-making process. It’s not very good if you want to incubate for more than 4 hours.
I’m curious about your methods, Mark, if you can make yogurt without having whey byproduct. Do you incubate for a short time or mix the whey back in?
Thank you Mark for the inspiration!
Used to make yogurt all the time and it tasted so much better then any brand. I only wish that the Euro Cuisine 6 cups would have 9 cups…
You can even make it easier and using less energy. Here there is a good explanation on how to do it just using a themos and a kitchen thermometer. For this you don’t neet any new appliances and is a more energy efficient way to make it. Go green!!!!
http://sepulvedanagy.blogspot.com/2009/05/recipe-for-homeade-yogurt.html
I would have to disagree with the boiling part. Boiling the milk has nothing to do with the solidifying. That part is due to the bacteria residue when they work. The real reason you heat the milk is to kill all unwanted organisms that would prevent the wanted ones to work.
As proof, I tried making my own yogurt with cold UHT pasteurized milk and it works fine. Also, when I make yogurt with normal milk, I only heat it up to 82 degrees Celsius (18 degrees less than the boiling temperature). It effectively kills bacteria and also prevents the formation of skin. The skin is mainly made of proteins, so when you remove the skin, you loose part of the nutritious value of your yogurt.
PS: I personally heat the milk to 85 degrees, just to make sure.
We have had good results using our food dehydrator as an incubator.