Making Homemade Yogurt - for soap of course!

I’ll start out by saying that I’m not a huge yogurt fan, but I love yogurt in baked goods and of course, in soap. The cost of yogurt is always a factor to consider though, so when my coworker recently introduced me to the fact that you can easily make your own yogurt at home, I decided to give it a try. 

It was soooo simple to make and costs substantially less than store-bought yogurt. You do need to start your first batch of homemade yogurt with a small amount of store-bought yogurt, but for subsequent batches you will use your own homemade yogurt as the starter.  

The method my coworker described involved using the oven and taking temperatures, but I searched around on the internet and found that you can use your slow cooker too. The slow cooker method seemed like a simpler option to me and didn’t involve taking temperatures, so that is what I decided to try. The method and recipe I followed is here. 

This particular recipe called for whole milk but I just used 1% as that was what I had in the house, and it worked just fine. Also, I was tired when I was making the yogurt last night and forgot that I meant to halve the recipe, so I ended up using only half of the amount of milk but the full amount of yogurt. Be aware that if you make the full recipe (using 8 cups of milk), that it makes a lot of yogurt! That’s why I chose to reduce the recipe, and it still made plenty of yogurt.

To make the yogurt: I warmed 4 cups of milk in the slow cooker on low for 2 hours and 45 minutes. Then I shut off the slow cooker and let the milk sit in the slow cooker for 3 hours. I then whisked in ½ cup (should have been ¼ cup) of plain yogurt into the milk and wrapped the slow cooker up in a towel and let the yogurt mixture sit overnight for an additional 12 hours. This is what it looked like after 12 hours in the slow cooker, before I stirred it:

And here it is portioned out, ready to be frozen into cubes for my next batch of soap:

I was really pleased with the results! And of course, the cost is far less that what you would pay at the store for yogurt.

Like I mentioned above, even though I halved the recipe, I still had plenty of yogurt left over. I’ve set aside some of the homemade yogurt to make these Yogurt Pancakes. I've also made this Yogurt Marmalade Cake from Pioneer Woman before and it's delish, so I'm hoping I have enough yogurt left over after the pancakes to make it also :)  

Speaking of my next batch of soap, I’m planning on using some of this homemade yogurt in the soap that I’m making for the Great CakesSoapworks Soap Challenge for this week - tiger stripes! I’m really looking forward to trying this technique, is anyone else planning on taking part in Amy’s challenges?