As mentioned a couple of days ago, I recently decided that I wanted to try making yogurt at home. Specifically, yogurt that The Girl would eat (nondairy). I started looking around for yogurt makers on the web, but then ran across a variety of recipes for making yogurt in a crock pot. Well, sweet. I gots me one of those.

It was surprisingly easy. Step one: buy some soy milk. In my case, I purchased a half-gallon of Silk Organic Unsweetened Soy Milk ($3.48 at my store), plus a single-serving cup of some vanilla soy yogurt with active cultures (I could not find plain). Total cost: about $4.50. For what will be about 1 1/2 quarts of yogurt after draining some of the whey and allowing for some evaporation.

I dumped the soy milk into my crock pot, reserving about a half cup, which I mixed with about two teaspoons of corn starch, then returned to the crock. Alt milk yogurts apparently need a bit of help thickening. I didn't want to overdo it, so this was all the thickener I used. And it was about right.

I turned the crock pot on "high" and put the lid on and set the timer for an hour. The goal was to get the milk very hot, then let it cool back down to 115-120 deg. Frankly I'm not sure why this step is even necessary when you are starting with pasteurized product, but whatever. After an hour, my soy milk was barely tepid. I stirred, put the lid back on and set the timer for another 20 minutes. And repeated this another 3 times, until I thought the milk was getting hot. I then clued in that I have a thermometer! So I checked -- ~140 deg. Ok, turn the crock off, pull it from the heating element and let it cool to under 120 so that I don't kill the starter. Time to go watch an episode of Supernatural off the DVR!

45 minutes later, my milk had cooled to 120. Close enough. I pulled a ladle-full or two to use to temper my 1/4 cup of starter, then poured the mixture back into the crock and stirred thoroughly to distribute.

Caveat: use a soy milk whose taste you like. This stuff, when heated, smelled like cake batter. I was skeptical, to say the least.

Next step: wrap the lidded crock in a beach towel to help insulate:

Into the oven (which I had pre-heated then allowed to cool back down to ~125 deg or so; this step probably was not necessary, and I was a bit worried that the oven was too hot and would kill my culture). Then to bed.

In the morning, I pulled the crock out and unwrapped. w00t! Yogurt!

the yogurt definitely set up. Not super thick, but thick enough:

the cake batter aroma was (mostly) gone, replaced with a fairly clean, mild yogurt aroma with just a hint of soy "beany"-ness. Same with the flavor. Mild yogurt up front, with some soy beany aftertaste. Not as tart or rich as really good whole-milk yogurt, but not offensive.

I decided to partially thicken some and then add it back into the batch:

My verdict: the experiment was a success. There were some minor textural flaws (a few bits of protein "skin" that formed on the top of the yogurt that I stirred back in to the final product instead of skimming off), and I would definitely do much more of the Greek yogurt thing of thickening the final product by draining whey. I also would let it ferment several more hours next time to get a thicker, tarter product. (I didn't get this into the oven until after midnight, and pulled it out at around 7:30 a.m.) But I am eating a bowl of it, mixed with a modest amount of cherry preserves, as I write this. With a little bit of add-in fruit and sweetener, the beaniness is not at all noticeable. This is a good product that is brain-dead easy to make. I will caveat in that I prefer plain, unsweetened, whole milk yogurt (Mountain High is my go-to brand for its clean taste, thick but smooth texture, and complete absence of added thickeners). You may find the unsweetened soy yogurt not to your liking, but you can always add stuff in.

the ultimate verdict, of course, is whether the Girl will eat it. She had some the first morning and pronounced it "good" to the Mrs, but was less enthusiastic to me later. It was "better" than the "crap" I used as a starter (which was indeed nasty, texturally and flavor-wise), but she did not rave. She approved enough to say that we should definitely make it again (probably with a better tasting soy milk than the organic Silk, which is...not very appealing).