Ingredients
Equipment
Method
- Fill your clean glass jars with your milk, I usually leave 1-2 inches of headspace
- Line the bottom of your large pot with a tea towel and set on your stove. Than place your filled jars in the pot.
- Fill the pot with lukewarm water until it reaches about 3/4 to the top of the jars. Make sure not to splash water into the jars. If you're worried about splashing you can put the lids on the jars while you fill the pot with water and then remove them when your finished.
- Turn on the heat to medium and allow the internal temperature of the milk to rise to 180 degrees. I like to occasionally stir the milk in each jar to keep the temp as even as possible. Once your milk reaches 180 degrees turn off the heat and carefully remove the jars from the pot.
- The milk will now need to cool down to a temperature of 110-120 degrees. I prefer to let the jars naturally cool instead of doing a cool water bath or sticking them in the fridge because I don't want to risk over cooling them, plus it's just easier to leave them alone. You can set the lids on top of the jars to prevent bugs and debris from getting into the milk, just make sure they're set on loosely.
- Once the milk has reached 110 degrees you'll want to add your culture. I always use yogurt from my last batch, but if this is your first time making yogurt you can use plain greek yogurt from the store, just make sure the container says LIVE ACTIVE CULTURES or else it wont work.
- Slowly stir in 2 tbsp of your yogurt culture into each jar. I don't worry about being exact so I just get a good spoonful and call it good enough. You don't want to go too far off of the 2 tbsp though, or you'll run into problems.
- Put the lids on the jars and tighten. Now the incubation period begins. You want to keep the jars warm for as long as possible so that the bacteria in the culture can do its thing. My go-to way of doing this is a good quality cooler and a jar of hot water.
Cooler Method
- I will use the leftover hot water remaining in the pot and pour it into a large glass jar (sometimes I heat it back up to make sure it's nice and hot but not boiling). And I'll put that jar, as well as my 4 other jars of prepared yogurt into my YETI cooler. I lock the cooler and put it somewhere out of the way for 24 hours. Most recipes tell you to let your yogurt incubate for 9-12 hours but I like to do 24 hours to get the benefits of a longer ferment. This gives our yogurt that tang we all love! After your desired incubation time open the cooler lid and pull out a jar. It should look like yogurt now. If it still looks like milk than something happened and your yogurt didn't set. In all of my yogurt making I've never had a failed batch using this method.
Finished Product
- You can now put the yogurt in the fridge if you want regular ol' yogurt. If you want greek yogurt though, you'll want to hang your yogurt in cheesecloth for another few hours to drain out any extra liquid. I always skip this step since we love the consistency of our yogurt.