Recipes Using Raw Milk Yogurt

Raw milk yogurt has a thin, delicate texture and a lovely, light tartness. You can make it at home very easily. Serve it plain with fresh fruit and a drizzle of honey or make homemade yogurt panna cotta for a special dessert.

Raw milk yogurt is yogurt that has been prepared using raw, rather than pasteurized milk. It has a thin, drinkable consistency similar to milk kefir, and a lightly tart flavor.

Like homemade yogurt made with pasteurized or scalded milk as well as other cultured dairy products, it's very high in food enzymes and beneficial bacteria.

My Version Of Easy Homemade Raw Milk Yogurt

Traditionally, you make yogurt by whisking the starter into pasteurized or scalded milk. After that, you let it culture for 6 to 12 hours. Scalding or pasteurizing milk denatures its proteins. This process makes them sticky. Accordingly, it's easier for those proteins to coagulate, or thicken as the milk cultures. The result is classic, thick and spoonable yogurt.

When you make raw milk yogurt, you whisk the starter directly into raw or unpasteurized milk. And since the proteins remain in their natural state, they don't coagulate resulting in a thin, rather than thick texture.

Raw milk yogurt also tends to be richer and has a more diverse array of bacteria than yogurt made from pasteurized milk.

Instant Pot Raw Milk Yogurt

Raw milk is naturally rich in bacteria, with some samples containing hundreds of varieties. For the most part, these bacteria are benign or even beneficial, but they can also be a source of pathogenic bacteria that cause serious food-borne illnesses (1).

When you make yogurt, you inoculate milk with a starter culture that's rich in specific beneficial bacteria that will give your yogurt flavor, texture, and many health benefits, too.

These starters include probiotic strains with strong anti-inflammatory activity. That's why yogurt is considered a nutrient-dense functional food. And the bacteria in yogurt help support optimal weight while improving gut, cardiovascular and metabolic health (2). These benefits aren't exclusive to yogurt made with raw milk.

Hour Raw Milk Yogurt Recipe Without Heating

When you make yogurt the traditional way with scalded milk, you can save a little bit of that yogurt to make your next batch. In this way, starter cultures can become heirlooms - preserved and passed on. These starter cultures contain specific strains of bacteria that give your yogurt consistency in flavor and texture.

Raw milk already contains a very wide variety of native bacteria. When you use it to make yogurt, those native strains mix with the strains in your starter culture. Over time, the native bacteria in your raw milk may outcompete the strains in your starter, producing off-flavors and inconsistent results.

So, for consistent results, it's best to use a new starter each time you make yogurt rather than preserving a little from one batch to the next.

How To Make Raw Milk Yoghurt

Further, use the freshest milk possible rather than old or sour raw milk. Bacterial counts in raw milk tend to grow rapidly in just a few days. Accordingly, these cultures may interfere with the bacteria in your starter culture, creating undesirable flavors or textures.

It's easy to make raw milk yogurt. First, you'll need to whisk your starter into your milk, and then let it culture.

Most yogurts culture best at a slightly elevated temperature of about 110 F. So, for best results, you'll need a way to keep your yogurt at a consistently elevated temperature. Some people use a thermos or tuck their jar of inoculated milk into the oven with the pilot light on, but a yogurt maker is a great purchase. You can also use the yogurt setting on your Instant Pot, too.

How To Make Thick And Creamy Raw Milk Yogurt

Rate this recipe! If you loved this recipe, give it a rating. Let us know what works, what didn't and whether you made any adjustments that can help other cooks.In this post, you’ll learn how to make yogurt from raw milk at home. This method is simple and produces rich, thick yogurt that is both delicious and healthy.

A few years ago, I had the pleasure and privilege of visiting an Arab goat herder in a small village in Northern Israel. That man woke up early every morning, opened the gates to his herd of 120 goats and off he went… Walking around in nature with them until sunset so they could graze.

Did you know people still do that? The whole system that he had fascinated me. How he took care of his goats and how he managed such a large herd by himself. I spent a few hours with him, asking a million questions. After a while, I got most of the answers that I was looking for but was still curious about one thing… What did he do with and how in the world did he process so much milk every day at home?

Homemade Raw Milk Yogurt

To answer that question, the man took me into his home and introduced me to his wife. That amazing woman had to process about 20 gallons of milk each day in her simple, small, home kitchen.

She was kind enough to share with me what and how she did it and I was surprised to find out that she mostly made and sold two kinds of dairy products… This raw milk hard goat cheese that I shared with you a couple of years ago and homemade yogurt.

In this post, I want to share with you her method of making a delicious and creamy raw milk yogurt. This recipe might not be following all or any dairy rules and it might not fall directly under a certain title, but the bottom line is that it produces a delicious homemade yogurt using a method that passed down through generations of simple people that live and breathe raw milk and non-fancy dairy processing.

Make Delicious Homemade Raw Milk Yogurt In Texas

The common complaint among those who try to use raw milk to make yogurt is that it comes out way too thin and runny. It’s not really scoopable (if that’s a word…), it’s more drinkable.

These folks are right. The reason that raw milk yogurt is so thin is because raw milk has its own set of bacteria that compete with the bacteria in the yogurt starter culture and so the milk doesn’t set as well as when you use pasteurized milk.

Option 1 – you can use raw milk from your dairy animals, heat it up a bit, add a yogurt starter culture, and culture your milk for a few hours. This will produce a thin kind of yogurt that is mostly drinkable. If you choose to do this, it’s better if you use a yogurt starter culture from the store each time for more consistent results.

How To Make Raw Milk Yogurt In The Instant Pot

Option 2 – you can choose to pasteurise your raw milk at home by bringing it to 145 degrees Fahrenheit and keeping it at that temperature for 30 minutes. Then, you’ll have to remove it from the heat and stir until it has cooled to 40 degrees F before you move it to storage in the fridge.

Once your milk is pasteurised, you can then use it to make homemade yogurt as you would use store-bought milk. You might use the crock-pot to make yogurt, do it the way that I show here, or choose another method but your yogurt will probably have a similar texture to the yogurt that is found in the grocery store.

Option 3 – is to use this method that I am going to share with you below. This method falls somewhere in between the two above. No, we are not going to pasteurise the raw milk, however, we are going to scald it before using it to make homemade yogurt.

How To Make Homemade Yogurt (easy, Step By Step)

This process is quicker, it allows you to produce yogurt with a thicker and creamier consistency (since by scalding the milk some bacteria is killed so it doesn’t compete with the bacteria that is in the yogurt), and you can use yogurt as your starter culture which means that you won’t need to purchase a culture at the store.

You’ll have to purchase yogurt with active bacteria for the first batch, but after that, as long as you keep some of your yogurt to be used as culture to make the next batch you can be completely self-sufficient when it comes to yogurt making!

You’ll need raw milk, of course! I only ever used cow’s milk and goat’s milk to make this homemade raw milk yogurt. Both kinds work great, however, you might be able to use other kinds of milk in this recipe.

How To Make Yogurt At Home Using Raw Milk

Aside from the milk, we are going to need just one more ingredient… Culture. What I like about this method mostly (aside from the delicious product…), is that there is no need to understand or buy a yogurt starter culture from a cheesemaking company (although, you can use it if you’d prefer).

For your first batch, you can simply buy one of those small yogurt containers at the grocery store and use it as your culture. When you choose yogurt at the store, make sure that the yogurt has live culture in it. Most plain yogurts that you find in the store contain live culture in them but it’s a good idea to check anyway. Look at the label on