Making Yogurt on Board the boat
My little helper when making yogurt on our sailboatWe are all fans of yogurt on the boat. We eat it as breakfast with fresh fruit; the kids have it as a mid-day snack at times. We even use it in smoothies when we think about it. We kept thinking it would be fun to try to make but just didn’t take the time or make it a priority to do it. Then we were looking at a small electrical rice cooker that had a yogurt setting, so we opted to go that route first. The recipe was pretty easy actually, and it only requires two ingredients. It is whole milk and yogurt active cultures (more on what that is below). We decided to make it with 2 quarts of milk, so the recipe in this case with the yogurt machine was only 2 quarts of milk and two tablespoons of yogurt that contains active cultures. The active cultures are important as not all yogurt contains them. What you want to do for your first batch is likely to go to the store and get some yogurt for the starter batch. You will want to get plain and not a flavored yogurt (no fruit or anything like that). Once you have found a small container of yogurt, you want to look at the ingredients and be sure it says “Contains Active Cultures” If it doesn’t say this, move on to the next container until you find one that does. This recipe and process will only work if the yogurt contains the active cultures, if not you will make warm milk and not yogurt :).
The actual details of the recipe if you want to do this without the machine is as follows
1 Quart of Whole Milk.
1–2 Tablespoons Active Culture Yogurt
Heat the milk in a saucepan constantly stirring until it reaches 160–180 degrees Fahrenheit. Do not boil the milk or scorch it on the bottom which is why you stir constantly. Remove from heat and allow it to cool to between 95–110 degrees Fahrenheit. Once at this temperature it is time to add in the active culture yogurt and stir thoroughly. Pour the mixture into a mason jar or thermos or some vessel that will allow it to maintain temperature. There are a couple of great low to no energy containers for doing this linked below. You want to now let is sit uncovered for 5–10 hours until it forms a custard-like consistency. Mixing it will slow the process to try to avoid doing that. A few hints while in this stage. If you do this in a mason jar, don’t put the lid on it but wrap it up with a towel and cover the opening loosely with the towel. The towel insulates the whole thing to help maintain that even temperature. If using a thermos or no electric crock pot, you may just need to cover the opening with a towel, so it allows air in and out.
Both of these are great insulated options that are handy on a boat as well.
See below for the video of McKinlee and I making our yogurt. It wasn’t until I was editing the video that I saw some of the funny stuff she was doing. I had to go and do some bloopers and outtakes on this one.
Feel free to check out our youtube channel for many other videos about raising our grandkids aboard our classic sailboat.
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