Making Yogurt in your Crock Pot: Very easy but there are tricks!

You can easily buy yogurt at your local grocery store for $5CAD for 750ml, but just for fun you can also try to make your own yogurt at home, in a Crock Pot. It is surprisingly easy to do, and the yogurt comes out very delicious. The cost was $1.83CAD for 1.3L of yogurt, excluding electricity costs. This is very economical.

What you need:

1. a Crock Pot: I have an old fashion one, not an Instant Pot, you can pick one up used very inexpensively
2. milk: Homo 3.5% fat milk ($7.40CAD 4L) comes out the creamiest, but is much more expensive and seems to never go on sale. 2% milk ($5.50CAD 4L) when on sale is more economical. They both taste very similar, to me.
3. yogurt: You can buy plain 3.5% yogurt from the grocery store, but make sure it says “live bacterial culture”. This will be your starter culture. You only need 1/2 cp of this.
4. thermometer (optional): This is useful but you can do without it
5. towel: big beach towel, thick, may need a couple
6. cooler (optional): to keep your crock pot warm
7. lamp with an incandescent 25 or 40 watt bulb (optional): used as an extra heat source inside the cooler

There are really only 3 steps:

1. Put the milk into your crock pot, turn it on to high, top on, heat for about 2 hrs. This heats up the milk to 82C and uncoils the milk proteins (protein denaturing). It also kills the bad bacteria that would compete with the yogurt bacteria. High or low setting depends on your crockpot, so you will need to experiment. Just get the temperature to 82C. Each Crock Pot will be different.
2. turn off your crock pot and plug it out, top on: Once properly heated up, you cut the heat and let the milk temperature reduce to 43C. If you add your yogurt starter above this temperature the good bacteria will be killed and will therefore not grow in your milk. This may take 2-3 hrs. I’ve been waiting until 49C and then add in the starter, which will cool the mix to 43C.
3. Put a 1/2 cp of your starter yogurt in a small bowl, add some milk and mix in well. It is better to take the yogurt starter out early and let it naturally acclimate to room temperature. Tightly cover, top on, and wrap with the towel or blanket. Place the crock pot (off), top on, in your cooler and turn the lamp on, steady at 43C, to ferment. If you have no cooler then wrap the crock pot up well and leave on your counter. Let the crock pot sit in the cooler overnight. The longer you let the yogurt ferment the more the milk proteins will be eaten by the yogurt bacteria, and the more sour it will taste.

The next morning your yogurt will be ready. Remove the crock pot from the cooler, turn off the lamp, unwrap the towel, stir and taste your yogurt. The yogurt might come out a little runny as compared to your store bought one, so you can strain out the whey liquid using cheese cloth. I opted to not do this. You can now refrigerate your yogurt.

Wasn’t that easy? This sounded too easy until I tried it, but it does work. Food with live bacterial cultures is supposed to be very healthy for you. This yogurt tastes very delicious. It was really easy to make.

Notes:
-My crockpot, with 1.3L of milk, after 2.5 hrs on low, the temperature is only 67C. The recipe calls for a temperature of 82C. I added 30 mins at high, which got me to 82C. On high it took 1:45 mins to get to 85C.
-Slightly heat up the yogurt to room temperature. I used a microwave and heated the yogurt for 20 seconds, but this is because I forgot.
-some recipes call for cooling to 49c, and then add the starter yogurt. When you do this the pot will then cool to 43C
-crockpot cooling to from 82C to 49C took 2:15
-crockpot in towel, in cooler, 25w lamp, 16 hrs later temp was at 39C, slightly cooler than required 43C
-cold crockpot on high, 1.3L bag of milk, 1 hr 45 mins goes to 85C, a little too high, over the 82C target, so next time I’ll try a reduced time
-cool to 50C took 2 hr 15 mins
-40 watt bulb held temp at 46C, just above the 43C. This is a better temperature than the 25 watt bulb, which held the temperature at 39C.
-final fermentation: 6-8 hrs mild, 8-12 hrs tart, between 12-24 hrs for sour taste. The longer then the whey will separate
-B#2 82C 2.5hr low to high, 43C 2.5hr, 39C 25 watt, overnight 18hr mild
-B#3 85C 1hr45 min, 49C 2hr15min, 46C 40 watt, overnight 18hr sour, whey drained
-B#4 82C 1:49min, 49C 2:15min, 47C, overnight 16 hrs, some whey separated, drained from the top, prop 1
-B#5 98C 2 hrs, a little too long, 49C 2:30min, 49C overnight 16 hrs, whey drained, prop 2

Making cheese: Along similar lines is making curds or cheese bits. This is yet another thing you can do with milk, but the cheese comes out tasteless but nutritious. All you need is milk and some white vinegar! Very simple, but it takes much more time than making yogurt.