One of the most popular pages on our website has to be the one with our recipe for homemade yogurt!
And the reason it’s so popular is that many people really don’t realize just HOW EASY it is to produce your own yogurt at home!
And we’re talking yogurt that’s not just delicious, but is extremely nutritious for baby and is wonderfully CHEAP – far more cost-effective for many of us than relying on the store bought variety.
But Amanda from Fountain Inn in the US wrote to us last week with an interesting question. She said…
I was wondering if I can make my own yogurt using some sort of soy starter? My daughter was recently diagnosed with several food allergies, milk being one of them. Any suggestions would be a great help.
The good news is that you CAN produce homemade soy yogurt in much the same way as yogurt made with cow’s milk – so if YOUR little one is allergic to milk, read on….
Making your own yogurt is as simple as mixing prepared milk with a bacteria ‘starter’ – which essentially ferments the milk, thickening it and giving it the distinctive yogurt flavour.
In our standard recipe, we suggest using either a commercial starter (which you can usually buy from natural/health food stores) or by using some store-bought ‘live’ natural yogurt.
Once you’ve made your first batch, then you can keep some of it back to use as the ‘starter’ for your second!
And you can generally do this up to about five times before your results begin to deteriorate and you have to buy another pot of commercial natural yogurt to start the whole process off again!
An identical process can be used for homemade soy yogurt, but you would need to use soy milk (of course!) and unsweetened, unflavoured soy yogurt as the starter.
If you are having trouble tracking down a suitable soy yogurt to use as your starter, then another option is to try a commercial starter (try the Yogourmet Freeze Dried Yogurt Starter (Amazon)
The only difference between homemade soy yogurt and yogurt made with cow’s milk is the texture.
Homemade soy yogurt can be very thin – almost runny – in comparison… but there is a solution!
What you need to do is add a teaspoon of agar agar powder when you mix the yogurt with the milk (in Step 5 of our recipe).
Agar agar is an excellent vegetarian substitute for gelatin made from seaweed.
It is available in many grocery stores, Asian stores, health food stores, or online.
And there you have it… homemade soy yogurt that can be enjoyed by the whole family – (and do note that you can use the above ingredients in a yogurt maker too, if you have one)!
If you like to prepare your own homemade soy yogurt and have any tricks to share for creating the perfect texture, please do leave a comment below!