Greek Yogurt

 Now that you know how to make yogurt, the next obvious step is greek yogurt. Judging by the yogurt cooler at the store over the past few years, greek yogurt has gotten very popular. It is also quite expensive and seems to be a bit of a mystery to people. Lots of people are buying it, and more people should be making it. Greek yogurt is nothing more than regular yogurt with most of the whey removed. It's much thicker, almost like a soft creme cheese. In fact, I've spread it on a bagel or two and been quite happy with the results.

Greek yogurt production apparatus.

How to remove the whey? The easiest way is with a coffee filter and a funnel. Just put the filter in the funnel and the yogurt in the filter and set the whole thing on top of a cup to catch the whey. Set it in the fridge and in the morning you have greek yogurt in the filter, and whey in the cup. In my experience, you get about half of what you put in the filter back out as greek yogurt, the rest drains out as whey. This means that if you want 1/2 cup of greek yogurt for breakfast, put one cup of yogurt in the filter. If you regularly ate 1/2 cup of yogurt and now you're eating 1/2 cup of greek yogurt, clearly your costs have doubled. This is a pretty good explanation for why greek yogurt is so expensive in stores. You can use any plain yogurt that you want to make greek yogurt. Full fat, half fat, no fat, it all works. You do have to use actual yogurt though, if your yogurt has any ingredients other than milk and cultures, your results may vary dramatically from what I show here.

Finished product, delicious.

I don't make greek yogurt too often, it makes me sad to throw away the whey. In fact, about the only time I make it is when I actually need whey for something. What could I need whey for? Whey is a fetid bacterial slurry that is quite useful when starting a batch of sauerkraut. You can start your kraut naturally of course, but like when I made my sourdough starter, if you add some of the correct little beasties at the beginning, your wait is less. I'll write more about my kraut later, I just started a batch today. For now, if you have a batch of yogurt around and have wanted to try greek yogurt, or if you already like greek yogurt and want to figure out if you can make it cheaper than you can buy it, give this a try.