Yet Another Post about Yogurt!

I think I may have finally discovered the secret to getting the right consistency when I make yogurt in the crockpot! After many, many attempts (all of which produced varying degrees of yogurt drinks rather than gelled yogurt, and all of which my children drank) I finally awoke to nicely gelled yogurt after letting it sit the requisite 8 hours wrapped in towels (for original posting of the crockpot yogurt recipe, go here). The only thing I did differently from the original recipe was adding plain gel at the 5 1/2 hour mark. I added two packets which is about 2-3 T. I was able to spoon out 2 1/2 quarts of nicely gelled plain yogurt, and I decided to add flavoring one serving at a time since blending flavoring in to the whole batch has always destroyed the gel consistency.

I put some yogurt in a small bowl, sprinkled a little bit of sugar on it, and poured in some pureed strawberries which I'd pureed in my one cup food processor. I was afraid to do anything more vigorous than stirring, for fear of destroying the yogurt consistency, so we ended up with yogurt that looked sortof chunky like cottage cheese, but was NOT runny, and it had a delicious strawberry flavor!


Son L deemed it "the best yogurt I've ever had!!", sons G and C liked it equally well with store bought yogurt, and daughter G said she liked it but it was still just a tad "bitter". I may not have added the same amount of sugar to each serving, but I'm trying to wean them off the sugar anyway, so maybe it will be an acquired taste? Anyway, it was pretty popular and today I'm fixing it with pureed blueberries. The children have always loved blueberry yogurt so I'm hoping for more rave reviews!

Yogurt in the Crockpot - Third time's a charm! (sort-of)

On my third try of making yogurt in the crockpot, I added 2 T of unflavored gelatin (found in the jello aisle) at the 5 1/2 hour mark, when you are stirring in the 1/2 cup of store bought yogurt with live active cultures. Then I let it sit for the required 8 hours, and when I took off the lid and peeked inside....voila! Firmed up yogurt! I was so pleased. (for original directions on making yogurt in your crockpot, go here.)

Unfortunately, adding flavoring reduced it to the consistency of yogurt drinks again. So I either need to accept that I can only make yogurt drinks, or need to keep experimenting with ways to add fruit without making it thinner. I am storing this batch in glass canning jars in the fridge and flavoring little amounts of it right before eating. So far we have made peach yogurt (adding one whole canned peach to 1/3 of the blender pitcher full of yogurt) and blueberry yogurt (adding about 1/2 cup of fresh blueberries to the same amount of yogurt). Both were good, but the blueberry flavor was the biggest hit.


Fortunately the children are amazingly willing to drink down all my experiments!

Yogurt in the Crockpot - Take Two

My second attempt at yogurt in the crockpot led to yogurt that was even runnier than the first time! All of the children liked this consistency better for yogurt drinks, however, so it was a happy flop. I blended strawberries in this time, and served it in little juice glasses which have lived at the very back of my kitchen cupboard for the last 12 years since breakable glasses don't generally mix well with children. Those were a big hit! Two of the children don't care for the strawberry flavor, but the other 3 love it and are guzzling it down.

Here is the website where I learned how to make yogurt in the crockpot.

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!