hi this is melissa from live healthy and blessed and this is canon today we're going to teach you how to make homemade yogurt it's really easy and you don't need to buy any fancy equipment you don't need to buy any incubators or any fancy starters you only need a few ingredients you need milk you need a sweetener of some sort and then we like to do well you don't have to do sweetener but that's what we like to do because we really don't like the taste of unsweetened yogurt and then we like to add vanilla extract as well and then you'll need some plain yogurt as well that's going to have the cultures in it to start to fresh batch so the first thing we're going to do we're going to make a big batch because we a large family you can ease like half it or quarter if you want this keeps several weeks I don't even know how long they've kept it before maybe even a month in the fridge it stays a very long time but we had a lot of yogurt few times a week and with we've got seven people on our family we go through a lot of yogurt so the first thing we're going to do is we're going to get a nice big pot and we're going to put our milk in our lot so we're going to be doing two gallons you have raw milk of course that way the best organic but we don't have access to raw milk so you can just use regular old milk from the store we use whole milk though not skim milk or anything like that want to have all that nice fat in there it's not bad free all right there's one and then all we're going to do is we're going to put it on the stove on medium and we're going to just put it on medium on a burner you may want to do something different depending on your burner but ours is medium and then we let it sit until it gets up to 180 degrees and once it's up two hundred eighty degrees then we're going to take it off the burner but it'll take a little while for it to do that I don't even bother to stir it I've never had mine squirting gun just don't forget about it just keep an eye on every now and then but it's pretty simple you just let it sit on the burn we're going to do and turn it on medium and we'll come back when it's reached 180 okay it's been about an hour and 10 minutes right now and I just used a meat thermometer just let me primer and my milk has come up to 180 degrees and it's steaming right now and so all we're going to do is pick it off the burner we're just going to set it on another burner now this is going to take a while for it to cool down to 110 degrees so depending on your stove it may take longer but it took mine an hour and 10 minutes just to give you a ballpark of about how long it will take to do it so that's it once this cools down then we're going to add the rest of our degrees okay it's been about three hours now and our milk has cooled down to 110 now if you have a smaller batch it's probably not going to take nearly as long to cool off but anyways our milk has got like a skin on the top of it and so we're just going to take a whisk I just like to get that off because you don't want all that in your milk that would be kind of sloppy so we're just going to get that off all the little bits okay like we're good on that okay now we have our we're going to add our sweetener that you don't have to do that if you want to have plain unsweetened yogurt but that's the way all the recipes out in the internet basically ours for plain men so yogurt and I wanted something a little bit more like what you get at the store that's sweetened with vanilla but just much healthier um the different ways I've done that I've always done white sugar typically which isn't technically the healthiest but that's what I've always done I used to use more but now i only use about a half a one and a half cups for two gallons you could do more you could do less just whenever your preferences I've done suking at before and it wasn't very sweet and it turned the yoga a little bit more brownish because the natural sugar just last time i did a batch i tried honey because I'd never tried honey to see how that would work and it worked and it had a slight honey flavor but it was a bit more sour than with the white sugar and today I've never done this before but we're going to try maple syrup and I have a feeling it's probably going to turn out really good so that's what we're going to do is we're gonna do that so you can dump that in there cumin we're just going to dump it straight in our pot just makes one dish okay so that's one and a half cups of maple syrup okay and then we've got three quarters of a cup of vanilla extract you could do more or less in another case and this is my homemade vanilla extract if you bought something at the store it might be a little bit strong but just figure out how much you like if you even want to use it at all and then this no matter what you're doing whether it's a plane batch or sweet and batch you need your plain yogurt I bought that from the store this is two cups of plain yogurt that's made sure it has the live active cultures in it because that's what's going to get this new batch started some people save their yogurt from previous badges but I've heard that doesn't always work very well and especially since this is going to be sweetened with vanilla unlike I don't ever bother with that and I've heard to that it can get weaker and weaker learn more and more sour the more you're using the yogurt for previous guy just so I always just buy a good quality yogurt from the store as my starter and so we've got two cups of that and we're just going to mix that in there it all starts turning up and we just use a whisk you don't stir it up too fast i forget if you mix it up too much it can kind of mess up your mess up your bat or mess up your the cultures are there but i have whisked it up pretty good and haven't really noticed a difference in the way it comes out so you want to make sure all of your maple syrup and on your sweetener especially if you're using white sugar it's going to take a little more longer dissolve and stir up because that sugar is going to take a while to break down all those crystals and especially keep sukin at it's going to take a bit longer to dissolve that if you use to can add or something like that with a bigger crystal it's best to do it before your milk has cooled all the way down because it'll dissolve better because I'd be a little warmer so you could take it off the stove and then you could dissolve you're seeking add if you want to leave that and then continue to let it cool down to 110 it has to cool down to 110 before you add your the yogurt starter like i did because otherwise i've been too hot and it will fill all those good cultures in there and in the bacteria and if it's too cool well it won't be warm enough to set it up and turn it over so 110 is basically room temperature the temperature that you want to get it to all right and so what we're going to do is we're going to put that into our containers that we have over here I found that this is the perfect size for our batches I got these at the store these are pyrex glass dishes like reusable each one of these is a half gallon size so i use for for my batch and we're just going to divide it all up evenly try not to spill I usually will pour it as it gets not quite as full and a few scoops cable and I usually kind of like to spread it all out instead of pouring it all in one container just to make sure that I get an even amount of the yogurt starter and every single container so I'll just kind of partially fill each one and then go back and fill them all up just to make sure that it's really evenly distributed and you don't need any like I say you don't need any special incubators you don't need any special starters online that cost a fortune it's really really easy to do and it costs way less than it would he bought yogurt at the store you can basically get two gallons of yogurt if you want to make that much for the cost of your milk and then your sweetener and your starter of course which really does not add up to a whole lot of money and yogurt is very very expensive at the store and if you really wanted to you can make your own Greek yogurt by just streaming it you can get like a like a fun cheesecloth to strain it but I found that's really a lot of work and then you get getting rid that way which is actually healthy for you anyways so there's really I I don't bother with a Greek yogurt we just leave it as it is and it's actually very thick anyways so there's really no need to do that and we like to add our yogurt to smoothies have it the breakfast that's just really good alright first filling it up this may seem like a lot of yogurt but our family it doesn't last all that long and it's never gone bad and the time it takes us to use it up let me to use it and smoothies a lot it's ever getting I'm afraid we're not going to use it up quick enough let me just go ahead and throw it on a smoothie all we're going to do now toilets don't spill it because it will leak all right like Stecklein i just put right here alright so now i'm going to do is I like to take to like bath towels i just use some old towels that i'm not really using and for me I like to kind of crisscross them and then I take my yogurt here over this way I just do one sack and one more and then I wrap it up all right and depending on the temperature your house is you may want to insulate it a little bit better just an depends on what time of year it is too but ours always stays warm enough that I've never had that problem so I've double wrapped it in my bath towels and I find a place on my counter to let it sit out of the way undisturbed for anywhere between 12 to 20 hours I usually like to do about 14 but it's not a big deal if it goes longer a little bit less but the longer it sits it'll be thicker and it'd be better some people do eight hours but it's not going to be as thick of a yogurt so 14 is usually what I go for and then I just set my timer and then 14 hours will be back okay our yogurt we let sit in those rap towels for about 14 hours like I said it can be anywhere between like 12 and 20 the longer you let it sit the more thick it'll be so if you don't let it sit long enough they'll kind of have a more running yogurt but what you do after you're done we took it out of towels and we put it in the fridge and you want to let it get in the fridge overnight so it gets nice and cold and really really thick so we just took this one out of the fridge it's already been overnight it's nice and cold and thick one thing I just want to say real quick my lids always seem to have a lot of condensation from water on it from sitting in those towels and so what I always do is I just bein all that condensation off the only thing I want to say about that is one time some of the condensation set here on the yogurt for a while on the top there's water in there and actually this was when it was we had a batch sitting in there for probably several weeks because like I said it takes a ball we make such a big batch and so it takes a little while to use it up but um anyways it started to get little moldy patches on the top because I think it was from the water that had dripped on the top of it so but that was after it sat in the fridge for a long time so I always just kind of like you pick it up and then get the condensation off off of the lid so this doesn't have any sitting on top of the yogurt so this batch we did with maple syrup which I've never done before this was sort of an experiment because of before I usually always did white sugar but we're trying to eat healthier now and so we don't use we did honey glass time in it and it tasted a little bit like honey nut a very strong honey flavor but it was pretty tart at the honey because it's a natural sweetener wasn't super sweet sort of like the white sugar was even though it's the same amount we put one and a half cups of our maple syrup in I used to have like two cups or more for a batch like this but since we always talk our yogurt with fruit or some sort of a homemade sauce like a berry sauce it's adding some sweetener back on there so we don't like our yogurt super sweet but we don't like it unsweet because it's just way too sour for us so we were going to try it and see what it tastes like with the maple syrup I'm Andre and we'll show you it's very thick too I don't know if you can see here it's pretty thick right back here very nice thick yogurt it doesn't actually have a maple flavor really of King tastes maple no it's not shower no it's not sour but it's not really overly sweet either but you can always add more of the sweetener if you like or less it's completely up to you but I wouldn't add too much to mess it up but you can probably use anywhere between one and two cups of your sweetener of choice for a batch this size like I said this is a two gallon batch if you use less than one cup it's going to basically taste sweet so alright well we hope you guys enjoyed the yogurt video go make yourself some yogurt and we also have a homemade granola video so go check that out thanks