Homemade Yoghurt and Quark: NaBloPoMo #4

Making our own yoghurt was one of the first things we did on our simple living journey. It's so easy, it's so much cheaper than the bought stuff, and it doesn't contain any artificial additives.

Rhonda has an excellent tutorial on making yoghurt and quark from scratch on her blog, here.

Being a former non-cook, the thought of making it completely from scratch worried me a bit (although I can assure you now that it's easy!), so I ended up buying an EasiYo kit from the supermarket for around $20 (I've since picked up a second one on sale for $16 and they pop up from time to time in thrift stores). It's essentially just a 1 litre container and another larger thermos-like insulated container; you pour boiling water into the incubator and pop the jar containing milk innoculated with yoghurt-making bacteria inside, seal and leave for the yoghurt to set.

You don't have to have one, you just need to keep your mix somewhere warm (about 45'C) for several hours. I know many people who use a thermos for example, or stick their jar of innoculated milk in an esky with a towel wrapped around it, in a warm oven after baking, or use a crockpot that was heated up and then turned off before use. In these cases though, you will need to make your yoghurt from scratch as per Rhonda's guide, as it will need to be warm when you wrap it up etc.

You can buy special EasiYo sachets of dried yoghurt mixes from the supermarket to make up in the jar - you just add water, shake and leave in the incubator to set. These are really simple to use, are a bit cheaper than bought yoghurt, but contain artificial colours and additives that I personally, don't like.

I do, however, still tend to "cheat" when making my yoghurt. The method I used to use is:

Take 1 litre of UHT milk and tip it into the jar; add 2 heaped tablespoons of dried milk powder and two heaped tablespoons of organic yoghurt*, mix well and incubate in the EasiYo overnight.

*Note: the yoghurt you use as "starter" contains the beneficial bacteria which converts milk to yoghurt: you can buy it, or use some yoghurt from your previous batch. If you buy it, you must use a plain yoghurt with NO flavouring, preservatives, colours or gelatine in it, as it won't contain enough of the beneficial bacteria to seed your yoghurt otherwise, and you'll end up with no yoghurt or a very runny mix.

These days however, I buy special yoghurt cultures, and use powdered milk to make our yoghurt:

Add 1.5 cups of powdered milk to the EasiYo jar and top it up with water; shake to dissolve the milk powder. Add around 20 grains of yoghurt starter culture, mix well and leave in the incubator overnight.

In Australia, the cultures can be bought online from Cheeselinks and Green Living Australia if you can't source them locally. The ones I buy are about $11 a packet, and make up to 250 litres of yoghurt: pretty cheap!

Making quark, or cream cheese, is just a matter of straining your yoghurt through a clean piece of muslin or cheesecloth, or a clean dishcloth (I have one I use for that purpose only until I get around to buying some muslin - I knew I should have saved all those muslin baby wraps, LOL) used to line a sieve. I leave it overnight in the fridge.


I sit a plate on top of the yoghurt with a weight on top (in this case a jar of red onion jam!) to help it to drain more completely.

And the next morning, it's nice a dry...

...With about 200ml of clear yellow whey in the bottom of the bowl. I save this (you can freeze it) for use in cooking (for example scones or pancakes, instead of buttermilk or milk, it gives them a lovely tang).

You can eat the cream cheese as is or mix anything savoury or sweet you like with it. This morning I mixed chopped garlic chives in with it, and we'll eat it with crackers for afternoon tea. We also like mixing honey and ground cinnamon with it, and having it on freshly-cooked bagels :-D My all-time favourite though is a "dip" made from plain quark with sweet chilli sauce slathered on top. Mmmmm, yum.

Easy-peasy!