… the yogurt, I mean. I made yogurt. This is exciting to me.

A while ago I found a second-hand breadmaker for sale on Nextdoor, and I’ve been making all of the bread we eat. I bake 2-3 loaves every week, depending a bit on the size they come out and who’s home for which meals. But we’ve stopped buying bread at the store entirely, and even accounting for the cost of ingredients this change will save us about $175/year. It’s not break-the-bank money, but it’s nothing to be sneezed at, either! Little changes like this add up, after all. But it got me wondering: what else could I be making for cheaper than I can buy?

Enter this recipe from The Daring Gourmet for homemade yogurt. My mother made yogurt for a time when I was a teenager, but her method involved leaving the milk and starter in the oven overnight, to be kept warm by the pilot light. Since moving out I’ve always lived in apartments with electric ovens, and so making yogurt never even crossed my mind. But this recipe uses something I do have: a slow cooker.

As it turns out, making yogurt is pretty darn easy. You simply fill your crockpot with milk (mine holds about 3/4 of a gallon) and heat it up to 180 degrees F. Using milk straight from the fridge, that took about three hours for me. Then you turn it off and let it cool down to 110 degrees — that took another two, two and a half hours. At this point you should also get your starter yogurt out of the fridge to come up to room temperature.

When everything’s sitting nicely at 110, you take a little of the hot milk and add it to your starter, just to temper it before everything goes back into the slow cooker. Stir the starter in very gently, then put the lid back on and wrap it all up for a cozy night in a bath towel:

That sign was for me as much as anyone else. I couldn’t wait to see how/if it would turn out!

In the morning, I unwrapped the towel, lifted the lid, and voila: yogurt. So  easy! So cheap! So yummy! We ate some of it straightaway for breakfast, and then I set the rest to strain through cheesecloth for a few hours to thicken it up a bit.

And here’s the result: somewhat more than a litre of yogurt (besides what we already ate), 18 oz or so of whey (which I can use instead of water in the bread I make for an extra protein punch), and a small container set aside to act as starter for the next batch. Perfect. And the best part is that assuming I make this once a week, we’ll be saving about $200/year just on our yogurt costs. If it lasts us more than a week we’ll be saving even more. Like I said: the little things add up.

Happy yogurt!