I go through a liter of so of yogurt each week, and it has generally come from the supermarket in kilogram plastic tubs. While these packages are recyclable, and it’s handy to have a few tubs around for storing paint or hardware, I would clearly prefer to reduce use of single-use containers. I’m also a fan of spending less money. Recently, I’ve found a neat way to spend less money, generate less waste, and play in the kitchen: make yogurt!

The key “thing” involved in this great leap forward was an Easiyo; they’re available in the local supermarkets for about $25 (all the prices here in NZD) or, for a fraction of that amount in the local op-shop. The Easiyo is simply an insulated bottle, sized to fit a 1L yogurt container along with a liter of warm water and some air - it’s certainly not necessary to have one to make yogurt, but I’d have a hard time beating it for the $4 it cost me, and it works really well. There are two different sorts of Easiyo makers available; the new one has a shorter yogurt container with more curvy sides than the old one - the new containers (more commonly available in the supermarket) fit fine in the older style insulated part (more commonly available in thrift stores). I haven’t experimented too much with flavourings yet, but there’s gobs of information on this stuff online.

The basic process is simple:

  1. In the yogurt container, mix a little less than a liter of milk at about 20C (perhaps with flavour added) to a bit of the previous batch of yogurt
  2. Put a liter of boiling water in the yogurt maker
  3. Put the bottle of nascent yogurt in the yogurt maker
  4. Add lid
  5. Wait for 9ish hours

My current preferred source of milk is a local dairy, where I can get a liter of pasteurised but not homogenised full cream milk for $3.50, in an exchanged glass bottle. According to a brief look around the usual sources, that’s not quite the cheapest, but it does hit my sweet spot for waste/cost/quality:

Source Cost/L Waste
Yoplait $5.50 43.5g polypropylene tub
Yogurt mix packets $5 5.9g foil/plastic bag
Local dairy $3.50 Steel bottlecap
Milk powder $2.25 TBD foil/plastic bag