I am taking a break from the baby saga posts to bring you this important public health announcement: sometimes, leaving your milk out overnight so it spoils with bacteria is OK! That’s how yogurt is made. And when you make your own yogurt, not only can you enjoy the delicious product of your (very light) toils, but you can also rest assured that less plastic was used and discarded!

I have been struggling for quite some time to find alternatives to our very trash intensive lifestyle. Everything comes in small, and often plastic packaging. We eat a lot of yogurt, and although I love the flavored Chobani cups, we used to have about 10 plastic cups a week (if not more). I could only use so many for projects, and they would often just end up in the trash (even recycling would use a lot of energy, plus not all recycling centers takes that type of plastic). Then we moved on to the quart yogurt containers, cheaper AND better for the environment. I would simply take the yogurt to work in a reusable container. However, even these containers started piling up. We were eating a quart a week, and again, how many plastic containers can I use during my lifetime? It’s terrifying to consider, really, how much plastic we are all putting out there.  If we were to use a quart container a week for the next 50 years we would have thrown away 2,600! Even worse, when we used the small cups, 10 a week for the next 50 years would have been 26,000 plastic cups!!

Duly sobered by my calculations, I decided to look up how to make  yogurt at home and found that it was actually quite simple! I used The Kitchn’s recipe. It has more details and such, so be sure to check it out, but here is my short version of the process:

1. Leave milk out all night, and it will become yogurt. The end.

Just kidding! You need to do a few more things, but that’s the gist.

• You need a half a gallon of milk, I used whole for creamier yogurt.
• You will also need a half of cup of a yogurt you like, the plain un-sweetened version with no flavors added. I used plain Chobani.
• You will also need a pot with a lid, a thermometer and a cup or bowl.

1. Heat the half gallon of milk until 200 F. Apparently this changes the protein structure so that it creates a solid as it cools instead of just separating.

2. Let it cool to 115 F, then scoop about a cup out and mix that with your half cup of yogurt. This seems to slightly warm the yogurt so it dissolves better into the milk.

3. Pour the thinned yogurt mix back with the milk.

4. Cover the pot with the lid and transfer to the turned off oven, with the light on. You can also wrap a towel around the pot, which I probably should have done. Between the oven light, towel and insulated oven environment, the milk will stay around 110 F. I checked every hour or so and that was the case.

5. Leave the milk to become yogurt for at least four hours, although it says you can leave it over night. I took mine out after five hours but it was still very light, so next time I’ll probably leave it in longer so it gets thicker. If you want Greek yogurt, you are supposed to strain it with cheesecloth, which we also should have done.

6. Be sure to save some of your yogurt before you add any flavoring to it to use in your next batch! Then add whatever you’d like to the yogurt. We did one quart with vanilla and sugar, the other is probably going to be honey flavored. And of course you can add fruit, granola, chocolate chips, whatever you can think of!

It was relatively simple to make yogurt, and fun too! I am saving a fair amount of money by making it, since a half gallon of milk costs about $2 and makes about half a gallon of yogurt, which would cost me $8 when buying quarts (I am rounding for simplicity). Even though we will still have waste from it, I can buy the half gallon in a carton, which is easier to recycle, and will only be ending up with 1,300 containers in 50 years. It’s not perfect, but much better!