One of the biggest conundrums we’ve run into in our quest for healthier eating has been snacks.  While the boys all love fruit, it isn’t always filling enough to keep them going. (Not much protein or fat in an apple!) They enjoy peanut butter with apples or bananas, but the biggest snack time crowd pleaser has always been yogurt. Last year we started buying tubs of full-fat, plain greek yogurt to mix with regular low fat yogurts, in an effort to lower the sugar and up the protein.  Later, we started using just the plain yogurt and mixing in a bit of honey, maple syrup, or jam as a sweetener.

Then we decided to try making our own. Supposedly, yogurt is easy to make! We heated our milk, cooled it, added yogurt cultures, let it incubate overnight and…we ended up with what the boys refer to as “drinking yogurt.” It turns out that the composition of goats milk leads to a naturally thinner yogurt. Not the end of the world, as we enjoyed that batch in smoothies, but not quite what we were hoping for. There are various natural methods of “artificially” thickening it, but after trying a few we decided that for now, goat milk yogurt wasn’t meant to be.

Instead, I’ve been using organic cow’s milk from the store to make yogurt in our Instant Pot. It’s significantly cheaper than buying organic yogurt, and it’s such a simple process there’s no reason not to. Dump the milk in, add a spoonful of yogurt starter, turn it on. That’s all there is to it! The problem: the boys have been complaining that they don’t like it. No matter what kind of fruit we’ve added, they snub it. “Come on, Gabe! There has to be something that you’ll like this yogurt with!” Pause. “…. Chocolate?”

My knee jerk reaction was “Of course not!” But then I thought about it.  The yogurt was already sweetened with maple syrup, what would actually be objectionable about adding some cocoa powder? Chocolate is considered unhealthy not because of the actual chocolate, but because of the fat, sugar, and milk added to it. So, there was only one thing to do. We made chocolate yogurt!  This was the result: It took about 7 seconds for them to rip through their bowls. And it only used a modicum of maple syrup as sweetener! I’d say this is a definite winner for a healthy snack time food.

Easy Yogurt
1. Mix 1/2 gallon ultra pasteurized milk (the ultrapasterurized is important! Regularly pasteurized milk has a high rate of failure in this method) with 1/4 cup yogurt with “live active cultures.”
2. Allow to incubate at 110 degrees for 8-12 hours.
3. Chill 4-6 hours, then stir in flavor and sweetener of your choice.

For the incubation period, if you’re lucky enough to have an instant pot with a yogurt button, go ahead and use it!  Otherwise, an oven on the “bread proof” setting or a bread machine set on “rise” will also do the trick.

We like to strain ours as it chills to get it even thicker. In fact, we’ve made so much yogurt recently that I may soon abandon our crude handi-wipe-in-a-colander method for an actual yogurt strainer!  Regardless, it’s great as soon as it’s chilled whether it’s strained or not.