Yogurt in the Crockpot

This weekend I made homemade yogurt in the crockpot. Thanks to my friend Beth, who sent me this link to a website dedicated to crockpot use! I followed the directions to the letter, with the only exception being that I used 2% milk rather than whole milk. Stephanie at the crockpot website recommended starting with whole milk because the higher fat content tends to gel better than milk with a lower fat content. But all I had was 2% so that is what I used. It was really easy! If you want to try this yourself, do keep in mind that it takes a long time so you either have to start it in the morning, or start it about5 or 6 in the evening and by morning you have a crockpot full of yogurt! You have to do something to it after 2.5 hours of cooking, and again after 3 hours of cooling on the counter, and finally after 8 more hours of sitting out on your counter. So plan accordingly. :-)

This is what it looked like straight out of the crockpot. It was slightly thinner than store bought yogurt, but still fairly firm.



None of my family likes plain yogurt, so I blended up some frozen raspberries (note: this works much better if the berries are THAWED!) and then stirred them into the plain yogurt. This did cause the consistency to become even thinner. It ended up more like a yogurt drink than actual yogurt. But my kids all love yogurt drinks, so this was not a problem for us.


This is what it looked like after stirring in the raspberry puree. I feel a little like a traitor because I did end up having to add a smidgeon of white sugar (after stating here that I wanted to eliminate white sugar from our diet!). I think I can slowly whittle the sugar down to where I am not adding it, but it was so much less sweet than store bought yogurt I had a pretty good hunch my kids would revolt. So I sprinkled a little sugar in to make it more palatable to the children. We all had some for lunch and it tasted great! Making it at home will be a significant savings over buying, and we eat lots of yogurt, so this is a happy discovery for me!


Next time I am going to experiment with adding plain gelatin to make it "set" better. This was recommended when using 2% milk but I had no gelatin so we did without. It was still delicious. A winner with everyone!