How to make yogurt in a yogurt maker

How to make yogurt in a yogurt maker? It’s very simple – follow this 2 ingredient recipe and you’ll get the most delicious homemade yogurt

What did the Scythians, the Ottoman Empire, Francois I, and the Bulgarians have in common? The answer is simple and obvious – “white oxygen”, “food of the gods”, “Persian milk”, “food of eternal health”, or simply… yogurt! Yes, they all knew how to make yogurt and use it for their own benefit.

Today all my culinary odes will be dedicated to homemade yogurt. Forget about the incomprehensible excessively sweet mixture of ten or more ingredients in a bright package that flaunts on the supermarket shelf…

I will tell you how to make yogurt in a yogurt maker

Everything is very simple – all you need is the ability to mix two ingredients (yes, it’s a 2 ingredient recipe, win-win!) and turn on a yogurt maker.

Homemade yogurt and store-bought one are (as my friend says) two big differences.

If you think that yogurt is just a thick, slightly sour milk dessert in a plastic cup, then you are very wrong. Natural, and even better homemade yogurt is:

• almost 10 million milk bacteria per gram!
• an excellent source of calcium for your body
• a whole collection of vitamins and trace elements
• great help to your immune system
• the absence of a huge amount of sugar and various thickeners
• and just a delicious healthy dessert or snack

Plus, making homemade yogurt is extremely easy!

The history of yogurt

No one knows exactly who, when and where invented yogurt. With accuracy, we can only say that the first homemade yogurt was prepared by itself and completely by accident. Lactic bacteria lived on earth long before our appearance and were waiting for their time. This time came when nomadic peoples in different parts of the world (mainly in Asia) transported goat and sheep milk on the backs of horses and donkeys. Of course, they did not use glass jars and clay jugs to transport milk, but wineskins. Nomads traveled on horses or donkeys, the sun heated the air and everything around, milk (tied to the back of a horse) dangled, bacteria present in the air and wineskins got into the milk and the result was… yogurt! The nomads were at first upset that all the milk had turned sour, but they plucked up the courage, tasted it and realized that they had a delicious new dairy product that did not spoil for a long time. That’s how they learned how to make yogurt. The taste and consistency of that dairy product differed from the modern one, but it can rightfully be called the great-grandfather of yogurt.

Yogurt owes its name to the Ottoman Empire

When the Turks attacked the ancestors of today’s Bulgarians, in addition to the prisoners, they took with them to Asia Minor also large herds of sheep. On the way to Asia Minor, the Bulgarian prisoners had nothing to eat, so they made something like curdled milk. The Turks really liked this fermented milk product, and they called it yoğurt. In Turkey, yogurt is still added wherever possible – to sauces, soups, meat, desserts and drinks.

How Homemade Yogurt Saved the King’s Life

Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent (the one who married the Ukrainian Roksolana) saved the life of French King Francois I at least twice.

The first time was when Francois I was defeated in the Battle of Pavia and was captured by Emperor Charles V of Habsburg. Perhaps, in this case, no one was going to kill the king, but no one was in a hurry to release him from captivity. Therefore, guided by the motto:” the enemy of my enemy is my friend ” Francois I and Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent concluded a Franco – Ottoman alliance.

For the second time, the Sultan did save the king’s life: in 1542, Francois I fell ill with a terrible illness for that time – intestinal disorder … and no doctor was able to help him. So the king would have died if his mother had not taken the situation into her own hands and written a letter to Suleiman the Magnificent. The Sultan sent his court physician to François I. The doctor left for France not alone, but with a whole herd of goats. Why goats? How why?! To make a healing Turkish homemade yogurt from their milk! It was this yogurt mixed with medicinal herbs that the doctor forced the French king to eat several times a day. Well, probably not quite forced, because the yogurt was very tasty and also miraculous, it cured Francois I.

The news about the healing homemade yogurt spread like lightning not only in France, but throughout Europe, and it was prepared and sold in pharmacies as an elixir for various ailments. Each locality had its own yogurt, with different names. But the recipes and the method of preparation were more or less similar to each other. The composition was also the same – two ingredients: warm milk and starter. In some localities, the starter was passed down from generation to generation, like levito madre in Italy.

It wasn’t until the early 20th century that scientists realized what makes yogurt so beneficial. It is not surprising that the question of the usefulness of yogurt interested Bulgarian medical student Stamen Grigorov. Bulgarians have known the secret of how to make yogurt for centuries and every day they added this ” “kiselo mlyako” ” (sour milk) to different dishes. So, Stamen Grigorov discovered that, in addition to milk, yogurt contains two types of lactic bacteria – Lactobacillus bulgaricus (they were named, of course, in honor of Bulgaria) and Streptococcus thermophiles (not to be confused with bad streptococci). This discovery attracted the attention of Russian scientist Ilya Mechnikov, who was interested in the topic of longevity and believed that death is a disease that can be cured (oh, what a pity that it was only a theory …) and, in his opinion, it was the stomach that needed to be treated. According to Mechnikov, it was this organ (or rather, the processes occurring in it that were the cause of the aging of the body). He studied the Bulgarian lactobacillus and suggested that it killed harmful microorganisms in the stomach and associated the longevity of Bulgarians with the consumption of yogurt. At that time, Bulgarians were considered long-livers (according to statistics, 4 out of 1000 Bulgarian residents lived for more than 100 years).

Later, the Spanish physician Isaac Carasso launched the industrial production of yogurt, and created the Danone company (which he named after his son).

Over the years, many different yogurt companies have appeared. Do you want yogurt with pineapple? No problem. A yogurt with pieces of chocolate? Easy! But it’s enough to try homemade yogurt once and you won’t even want to look at a store-bought one anymore.

With homemade yogurt, your imagination is unlimited! Choose sweeteners of your choice – honey, sugar, jam, maple syrup, or just fruit. Add goji berries or chia seeds, granola, oatmeal and eat healthily.

Ingredients:

If you are a happy digital kitchen scale owner, I highly recommend using it instead of cups and spoons. Especially when it comes to baking recipes. A scale gives you far more accurate results than volume measurements (everyone scoops ingredients differently). Trust me, using a kitchen scale to measure ingredients will take your baking to a new level.

It’s a 2 ingredient recipe, so you’ll need only

• 4 cups (1 liter) of pasteurized unboiled whole milk (the fatter the better)
• 9 Tbsp (125g) plain unflavored whole yogurt (look for yogurt that contains only milk, Lactobacillus bulgaricus and Streptococcus thermophiles) – it acts as a starter in this recipe

How to make homemade yogurt

Milk and yogurt should be at room temperature. Stir them together

Pour the milk and yogurt mixture into the bowl or cups of a yogurt maker.

From my own experience, I can say that yogurt bacteria like darkness more than daylight. I don’t know why, but yogurt turns out thicker and tastier if you leave the yogurt maker in the dark. I do like this: I leave the yogurt maker overnight (I turn it on at 11 pm and leave it until 7 am, for a total of 8 hours.

Stir the finished yogurt well, leave to cool and refrigerate for at least 1 hour. This will allow it to thicken.

Useful Tip: leave 9 Tbsp (125g) of your homemade yogurt apart in the fridge and use it as a starter next time just stir it with milk and make new yogurt.

How to store homemade yogurt

Store it in the fridge in a clean glass container for up to 10 days.

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Tried this recipe? Please leave a comment with Star Ratings ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ below. I will really appreciate it.
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