I am following the bi-phasic SIBO diet at the moment and I am in the second phase of the diet now. In this phase, you can add some dairy back into your diet.

Such as aged cheese and yogurt. But for yogurt, the advice is to only eat homemade yogurt, so that was a great opportunity to test the yogurt function on my CrockPot Express.

It was actually super simple to make yogurt from scratch with the CrockPot Express, so I am going to show you how that works in this blog.

What do you need for homemade yogurt

To make your own yogurt, you only need three things:

• 1 liter of milk
• A yogurt starter culture
• A cooking thermometer

I tested making yogurt with several kinds of milk: semi-skimmed and full-fat milk. Both worked fine!

I personally preferred the yogurt with full-fat milk because it became more like a Greek yogurt and I like that. But you can use both.

The yogurt starter culture you can find at several places. You can for example order it from Amazon. I used a Greek yogurt starter.

Making yogurt in the CrockPot Express

Making the yogurt is not difficult at all. You start by heating 1 liter of milk (4 cups) in a pan. Heat it slowly until it starts boiling. Be careful not to burn the milk.

You do this to kill the bacteria in the milk that might otherwise react with the starter. Turn off the heat.

Put 200 ml of milk (5/6 cups) into a bowl so that it can cool down a bit quicker. Pour the rest of the milk into the pan of the CrockPot Express.

Leave the milk to cool down and check the temperature now and then with the cooking thermometer. When the 200 ml of milk in the bowl reaches a temperature of about 30 degrees Celsius (86 F), add the starter to the milk. Stir through carefully.

On the instructions of your starter, you can find how much of the starter you need for 1 liter of milk.

For the milk in the CrockPot Express, you wait until it reaches about 40 degrees Celsius (104 F). Because this is more milk, it will probably take a little longer to cool down.

When the milk has reached 40 degrees Celsius (104 F), add the 200 ml of milk with the starter to the CrockPot Express. Stir it carefully. Don’t stir too much because you don’t want to get too much air into the milk.

Turn the CrockPot Express on the yogurt-making setting. Don’t put the lid on, for this setting, you don’t need the lid.

Making the yogurt takes between 5 to 12 hours. The longer you leave the yogurt to ferment, the lower the amount of lactose in it will be. So if you want a low lactose yogurt, it is best to leave the yogurt to ferment for the full 12 hours.

Leave the yogurt at least until it is firm. I usually make my yogurt overnight.

When your yogurt is done, turn off the CrockPot Express and leave the yogurt to cool in the pan for 2 hours.

Then transfer it to a box and put it in the refrigerator to cool for at least 6 hours.

When I used the full-fat yogurt, my yogurt already turned out quite thick. If you want a thicker yogurt, you can also choose to drain it in a cheesecloth, to get even more of a Greek yogurt structure.

And that’s it! Your own homemade yogurt.

How to create another starter

The yogurt starter culture that I bought was enough for 4 liters of yogurt. But if you are smart with your homemade yogurt, you never have to buy another starter again.

Simply put some of your homemade yogurt into an ice cube mold and freeze them. One ice cube of yogurt can be used to make another liter of yogurt.

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