Making (the best) Vegan Yogurt

Guys. Months before my youngest was diagnosed with food allergies, I started making homemade yogurt. And when I say I started making yogurt, I don’t mean I made a batch here and there. I mean, my toddler and I were stuck at home during quarantine, and we were making and eating A GALLON of sweet, sweet cow yogurt each week. We would buy a gallon of milk from the store. Make a gallon of plain yogurt. Eat it at snack with chia and granola and raisins and chocolate chips and it was a magically peaceful time of day. When the youngest tried this delicious yogurt, she vomited everywhere, started gasping for air, and we spent the next four hours hanging out at the ED.

Could I still have a dairy yogurt for me to eat? Sure. Do I want to confuse my homemade yogurt with the kid’s safe yogurt and risk needing another epinephrine injection? Not even a little bit.

So, I set out find the best vegan yogurt recipe. I had a couple of qualifications to make it as close to full fat, plain Greek yogurt as possible.

1) Nutrition: the more fat and protein the better

For protein, I decided to make it mostly from soy milk. To add fat, I also add in a can of full fat coconut milk. You can taste the hint of coconut in the final product which makes it harder to use in some savory cooking applications. But, toddlers need their fat and without dairy you got to use what you can.

2) Thick: I mean I know it’s not going to be like strained Greek yogurt, but the closer we could get to “could be eaten with a spoon by a toddler” and further from “yogurt soup” the better

It seems like vegan yogurt is always a little thinner than the original thing. The trick to thickening dairy yogurt is to make sure it stays at that special 110^oF incubating temperature for as long as possible. That’s not enough for vegan yogurt, though. There are a lot of thickeners suggested online, here are a few I’ve tried:

• Agar agar- it was the easiest to add into the milk while heating, and it did thicken the yogurt…. but it made a very strange, lumpy texture. If you aren’t into molecular gastronomy and don’t want to try lumps of yogurt jelly, this probably isn’t for you.
• Arrowroot starch- created a yogurt soup situation
• Cornstarch- leads to the best end product, but every time I add it, I make a huge mess. It’s hard to get a full ¼ cup out, you have to stir it with a little bit of cold milk before stirring it into the big pot, and it’s got to be heated for 5-10 minutes to thicken. Then after the milk has cooled to incubating temperature, you have to skim off the top so the yogurt isn’t chunky. Yummy! It does make the best final product, but it’s so annoying.
• Powdered milk- it did thicken surprisingly well, but it tasted a little grainy. I liked adding more protein into the yogurt, but I don’t think it’s worth losing the creamy taste.

3) Plain: I like my yogurt the way I like my tea. Plain. Unsweetened. And by the vat.

Despite claiming I like it unsweetened, I do add some sugar to my recipe. The bacteria that transform the milk into yogurt eat sugar. In dairy milk, they eat the lactose. In unsweetened soy milk and coconut milk, there’s really not much sugar. I don’t want warm vegan milk- we got to give those bacteria something to eat!

 

I think it’s pretty good. My son and daughter like it. My wife is yet to try it. It’s at least something similar to yogurt that is safe for my daughter to eat. I’m not going to have a lot of recipes on this blog. But, here is one that I spent time specially curating.

Ingredients
2 quarts unsweetened soy milk
1 can full fat coconut milk
2 tb sugar
¼ cup cornstarch
Yogurt starter (1/4 cup yogurt or a package of dried yogurt starter)

Directions

1.      Heat soy milk, coconut milk, sugar, and cornstarch to 180 ^oF, stir occasionally.

2.      Cook at 180 ^oF for 5 minutes.

3.      Remove from heat. Let cool to 110 ^oF

4.      Mix in yogurt/yogurt starter (scoop out about 1 cup of warm milk and combine; then pour that back in bigger pot and stir)

5.      Incubate for at least 8 hours, maintaining as close to 110 ^oF as you can to keep the bacteria happy

a.      Some of the advice online for maintaining this temp: use the yogurt setting on an instant pot (the best). Buy yogurt makers. Put it in your oven with only the light on. Wrap up your crockpot bowl in towels.

b.      Before my instant pot, what worked best to maintain the temperature was filling up jars and wrapping them in towels in a cooler. If the cooler wasn’t packed full of warm milk, I would add a jar or two of hot water to keep the temperature up in the insulation.