Raw milk yogurt recipe; no heating required

Raw milk yogurt recipe; no heating required! How I make my raw milk yogurt in my instant pot with no heating to keep it raw & probiotic rich!

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We love our raw dairy around these parts.

I’m talking several servings a day of some form of it.

For sure raw milk, then also raw cheese and raw milk yogurt, grassfed butter. And kefir before I accidentally killed my grains when I was sick for an extended period of time…I still need to get more of those.

The point is, that I believe raw milk and other raw dairy is an amazing superfood, and one of the essential pieces to a healthy ancestral diet.

It is full of live probiotics and enzymes, that’s why so many people become “dairy intolerant” when consuming pasteurized dairy. They are drinking it without the necessary enzymes and other living organisms they need to digest it. So it eventually starts to create gut issues and then a sensitivity or “allergy”.

Yogurt is even more digestible than raw milk if you are someone with a minor intolerance to it. Fermenting the milk into yogurt increases the probiotics and other good bacteria that make it gut-healing and digestible, and it also ferments out some of the lactose.

That’s why I think every traditional kitchen cook needs to know how to make raw milk yogurt.

Raw milk yogurt recipe

You don’t have to use gelatin for this, it’s just optional, I just find I have a bit better success with it solidifying into a thicker yogurt once cooled if you use the gelatin. But I made this for years without the gelatin as well and we loved it!

Also, one more note before we begin, if you want to strain the whey out to use for other things (important for using during the GAPS diet), then omit the gelatin. The gelatin makes there be much less whey to strain off.

Ingredients:

• 1/2 gallon raw milk
• 1 cup plain whole milk yogurt with no additives
• 1 tbsp 100% beef gelatin (optional)

Put about 1/4 cup of the milk in the instant pot. Turn on the yogurt setting to heat it just gently.

Add the gelatin in, whisk it up thoroughly. Usually people heat it up more than I do with adding the gelatin. But I have found that it works just fine with doing a gentler heating. I don’t want to heat the raw milk too much or it pasteurizes it. That just totally defeats the purpose of using raw milk.

Add the cup of plain yogurt as well as the rest of the raw milk. Whisk it up until everything is really well combined.

Set the yogurt setting for 24 hours, put the lid on, and let it ferment. You can do it for less time if you’d like it to be less sour, but the longer you go the more set-up it will get and the more probiotic benefit.

Once it’s done, pour out into glass mason jars and put in the refrigerator to chill.

you might not notice a difference from the gelatin right away when it’s first done in the instant pot. But you’ll notice it after it’s chilled, that’s when the gelatin will make it firmer and more like a traditional yogurt consistency.

It’s insanely easy now that I have my instant pot, to make this yogurt! I feel so spoiled!

If you don’t have an instant pot

What do you do if you don’t have an instant pot though? Have no fear! I have a solution for that problem as well!

For the first 2 or 3 years of making homemade yogurt I didn’t have an instant pot. I had seen some people would make their yogurt in the oven on the warming setting, but with varying success, and I was worried about breaking my jars, so I never tried that.

I eventually settled on the ice chest method.

You combine all the ingredients, same as above, but instead of putting them in your instant pot, you mix them all up and pour them in glass quart jars.

Then you set all the jars in an ice chest.

Fill the ice chest up to the neck of the jars with as hot of water as will come out of your tap.

Put the lid on and remember to keep checking the temperature with your fingers every few hours. I’m not too particular about actually checking it with a thermometer, but you certainly could do that. It’s supposed to be around 108 – 112 degrees fahrenheit.

If the water becomes too cool you can boil a small pot of water and slowly mix it in to get the whole chest warm again.

You allow the yogurt to ferment for 24 hours like this.

That’s my favorite simple method for making this if you don’t have an instant pot. It’s a little more hassle to be sure, but not bad at all.

And beannachdan (blessings)!

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