How to Make Greek Yogurt with Just 2 Ingredients!

Bold Bakers, as part of my bold baking basics series where I show you how to make many homemade ingredients from scratch in the comfort of your own home, today we are going to be making Greek yogurt. This is such a fun one because once you see how easy it is to make it and then what you get at the end, it's really incredible. So we're going to start out with two ingredients. Here I have a heavy bottom saucepan and I'm going to add in full fat milk, whole milk. Just so you know you can make this using a dairy free milk too and it will work really well. So over low heat we're going to let this milk come to a simmer. Now this is going to take around you know 15 minutes or so, it does take some time. We want to do it low and slow. What we're going to do is just stir so the milk doesn't stick or kind of scorch to the bottom of the pot and what we're going for is a mixture that looks like it's almost always about to simmer but it doesn't. It'll form kind of a skin on top. Bubbles will appear but it's not going to simmer or boil. We call this scalding the milk and we do it for lots of different reasons and once it gets to that point we're actually going to hold it there for around five minutes. That point where it's not going to get any hotter, it's not going to start bubbling because what that will do is that will actually make for a thicker Greek yogurt. It will change the nature of the milk and it will make actually the end product a lot thicker. It's going to take a few minutes. I want you to see what this is supposed to look like. The scalding point is just like this. Your milk will get a little bit foamy. It'll start to steam. It's not a bubbling but there are bubbles. This is the point you want to hold it for around five minutes and you might feel it catching on the bottom of the pan. I wouldn't use a spatula. I would use a wooden utensil and then just stir it and you'll notice it continue to steam. So I'm not using a thermometer for this and I've made this many times and I haven't used a thermometer but if you are looking to do that to make sure you get the right temperature, it's 108 degrees Fahrenheit. You want roughly this temperature to be. But this looks good. So I'm going to turn off my milk. I have a glass bowl here. I'm going to pour this in and let it cool down. You know it might have caught a little bit on the bottom of my pot but it didn't scorch and didn't burn. So that's important. That's how we do all that stirring. So we're going to let this sit at room temperature to cool down for a few minutes. What we want to be able to do is get to a point where we can put our finger in for a few seconds and kind of blood temperature, maybe a little bit hotter. You're looking if you're using a thermometer around 100 degrees Fahrenheit. If you want to speed this up, you can maybe put it over a bowl of ice. I'd be careful about doing that because it could speed it down too fast and we still need to add in our yogurt when it is at this temperature. So I'm going to be patient and I'm just going to stir it every so often. If a skin forms, which it normally does, just remove the skin and then give it another stir. So I waited patiently. I can now put my finger into the milk for around five or six seconds. It starts then to get a little bit hot. But this seems perfect. And like I said, a hundred degrees Fahrenheit on the Tamama shirt. Now, like I said, Greek yogurt takes two ingredients, milk and yogurt. So now you're probably thinking I need yogurt to make yogurt. Well then how do I get the yogurt to make that yogurt? So yes, the way you make yogurt is you do need a live culture and the yogurt that you want needs to be, um, have a live culture. So just make sure you read the tub. But if you don't have yogurt, you can also actually buy a starter online on Amazon. They sell them, but it's a living thing. It's active and you do need us to make yogurt. So we're going to add that. We're going to whisk that into our heated milk and this is going to be the culture, the bacteria that we're adding in to set us. So just give that a whisk in. So if you're dairy free, you can actually use a dairy free yogurt as your starter. And that's just plain yogurt, not Greek. So now that was probably the hardest part of this recipe. Here's what we're going to do. You know, before when I made yogurt, I said push into a sterilized jar that, you know, years later now I know that I don't always have to put in a sterilized jar, just a clean jar. So if you want to sterilize the jar, then feel free to do that. What I like to do is keep it in this bowl. I'm going to put a plate on it and I'm going to wrap it up nice and snug, just like this. So here's what I'm going to do with my yogurt. I was baking a few hours ago with my oven. It's still slightly warm, so it's the perfect environment to put my yogurt in there for a few hours and help it set. There is a million different ways you can do it. You can put it in your oven with a pilot light on. You can put it in a warming drawer in an aga. They put it in the little one that's a little bit warm. You know, you can put it in a crock pot and with a little bit of water in there, you can put it wrapped up really well with like a bath towel, whichever way you like to do it. I'm going to list those on BiggerBolterBaking.com along with the recipe. But this is what I'm going to do, so follow me along. So when I first made yogurt, I made it overnight for around 14 hours. And that works really well too, but I did notice that I can actually make it within around a six hour time frame. So I'm going to leave that in my oven for around six hours, come back and see that it's set. If it gets a bit cold in there and you feel like it needs a bit of a josh, take it out, turn on the oven for a few seconds, turn it back off again and pop it back in. It'll live happily in there for hours. So now for the moment of truth, I'm a little bit nervous because we're doing this live. Oh look at this! Check it out! It's beautifully set! Oh fantastic! My gosh, let's have a little look at the texture. Oh wow, absolutely gorgeous. Nice and thick, smells a little bit sour. Lovely. So now here's something that I did not know until recently and I should have known, is that the difference between plain yogurt and Greek yogurt is that Greek yogurt is strained. So this is plain yogurt right now. Once it gets strained, it turns into Greek yogurt. You might have known that I didn't. So here's what we're going to do. I have a bowl, a large bowl lined with a big sieve and then some cheesecloth. My cheesecloth is really kind of thick for some reason, so I'm going to do just two layers. If yours is thinner and kind of like loosely woven, then maybe do four layers. We just want to make sure that liquid can get through. So put your yogurt in there like so. Some people, and I've done this myself years and years ago, when I made I think labna or something, I tied this up and then I strung it from a shelf in my fridge, which is kind of hard to do because you don't have a lot of shelf space. But leaving it here like this to sit in it is good enough and we are going to put this in the fridge overnight and as it sits it will drain and it will get a lot thicker. You'll end up with the results of Greek yogurt, the kind of thick yogurt that we know and love. So that's it. So this is going to go into the fridge to get out all of that liquid. We're looking at 24 hours in there. When you check on your yogurt the next day, you'll see a lot of liquid in the bottom of the bowl. This is a good sign. Once you unwrap it, you can give it a little bit of a squeeze to get out any excess liquid. And that's your homemade Greek yogurt. I'm going to put it in a bowl with some raspberries and drizzle of honey. My family loves Greek yogurt in smoothies, in parfaits, with granola, and to be able to make it at home so easily is such a nice treat and something that I can do for the family. It's two ingredients and it's very inexpensive. I hope you found it as interesting as I did to make your own homemade Greek yogurt. This is definitely something I'm going to continue doing. Thank you so much for watching. Let me know in the comments below what other basics you'd like to see me make and I'll see you back here again really soon.