We are all fans of yogurt on the boat. We eat it as breakfast with fresh fruit, the kids have it as a mid day snack at times and we use it in smoothies when we think about it. We kept thinking it would be fun to try to make but just didn’t take the time or make it a priority to do it. Then we were looking at a small electrical rice cooker that had a yogurt setting, so we opted to go that route first.
The recipe was pretty easy actually and it only requires 2 ingredients. It is whole milk and yogurt active cultures (more on what that is below).
We decided to make it with 2 quarts of milk so the recipe in this case with the yogurt machine was only 2 quarts of milk and 2 tablespoons of yogurt that contains active cultures. This is important as not all yogurt contains “active cultures”. What you want to do for your first batch is likely go to the store and get some yogurt for the starter batch. You will want to get plain and not a flavored yogurt (no fruit or anything like that). Once you have found a small container of yogurt, you want to look at the ingredients and be sure it says “Contains Active Cultures” If it doesn’t say this, move on to the next container until you find one that does. This will only work if the yogurt contains the active cultures, if not you will make warm milk and not yogurt :).
The actual details of the recipe if you want to do this without the machine is as follows
1 Quart of Whole Milk.
1-2 Tablespoons Active Culture Yogurt
Heat the milk in a saucepan stirring constantly until it reaches 160-180 degrees Fahrenheit. Do not boil the milk or scorch it in the bottom which is why you stir constantly.
Remove from heat and allow it to cool to between 95-110 degrees Fahrenheit. Once at this temperature it is time to add in the active culture yogurt and stir thoroughly.
Pour the mixture into a mason jar or thermos or some vessel that will allow it to maintain temperature. There are a couple of great low to no energy vessels for doing this linked below.
| You want to now let is sit uncovered for 5-10 hours until it forms a custard like consistency. Mixing it will slow the process to try to avoid doing that.
A few hints while in this stage. Both of these are great insulated options that are handy on a boat as well. |
See below for the video of McKinlee and I making our yogurt. It wasn’t until I was editing the video that I saw some of the funny stuff she was doing. I had to even go and do some bloopers and outages on this one.