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 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 low, top on, heat for 2.5 hrs. This heats up the milk to 82C and uncoils the milk proteins (protein denaturing). It also kills bad bacteria.
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
3. Add 1/2 cp of your starter yogurt to your milk and mix in well. Slightly heat up the yogurt to room temperature. I used a microwave and heated the yogurt for 20 seconds. 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. 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 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.

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.