Homemade yogurt

Making yogurt at home is much less expensive than buying it at the grocery store. This recipe, from Arab Cooking on a Prairie Homestead by Habeeb Salloum, shows you that you don't need any fancy equipment either! If you have milk, yogurt, a pot, and a large bowl you're all set.

• 8 cups, or 2L of milk
  
  
• 4 tablespoons of plain yogurt

1. Pour milk into a pot, and bring to a boil on the the stove. Immediately lower heat to medium-low, and simmer uncovered for 3 minutes.
   
   
2. Remove milk from heat and transfer to a large bowl. Let it sit until it's cooled down to a lukewarm temperature. When you can hold your finger in the milk for 10 seconds, it's cooled enough.
   
   
3. Thoroughly mix in the yogurt, and cover the bowl. Wrap with a heavy towel and allow to stand for 8 hours on the countertop.
   
   
4. Transfer bowl to the fridge. Let yogurt sit overnight before serving.

• The 4 tablespoons of yogurt that you mix into the milk is called a "starter", and it has living bacteria in it that produce yogurt from milk. Any unflavoured plain yogurt from the grocery store usually works as a starter. You can buy specialty starters from health food stores instad, but these are more expensive.
  
  
• Once you start making yogurt, you can set aside a small amount of each batch to use as a starter for the next batch. You may want to add plain yogurt from the grocery store every 4 or 5 batches, to reup your yogurt bacteria
  
  
• You can use any kind of milk to make yogurt. It does not need to be unpasteurized; you can try this recipe out with whatever you have in the fridge. Whole milk will make a creamier and more flavourful yogurt than skim milk, but either will work.
  
  
• If you have trouble with your first batch of yogurt, the University of Missouri has put together a far more detailed yogurt making guide with trouble shooting instructions that may help! Click on the link below to access it.
  
  University of Missouri's Homemade Yogurt Guide

• For sweeter yogurt, add 2-4 tablespoons of honey or sugar to the milk in step 1, when you put the pot on the stove to boil.
  
  
• For less sour yogurt, reduce the time it sits on the counter in step 3 to as little as 4 hours. The longer the yogurt sits on the counter, the more tart it will be.

• Yogurt will keep in in the fridge for around 10 days

Recipe adapted from Arab Cooking on a Prairie Homestead, by Habeeb Salloum

Food is Too Expensive! was funded by the City of Saskatoon through our Healthy Yards partnership, the Cyril Capling Trust Fund of the College of Agriculture and Bioresources, and the Department of Plant Sciences. Focus group research to inform this work was collected by CHEP. Thank you all for helping us make healthy food more accessible!