We eat a lot of yogurt, but I’d never tried making my own. I’d heard in the past about using your slow cooker to make yogurt, but it seemed too complicated to be worth it. Then I heard about Instant Pot yogurt, I figured it would be worth a try. Once I finished making it, though, I started to wonder how it compared to store bought yogurt. I did all the work for you, so now you can decide if making Instant Pot yogurt is worth it.

Instant Pot Yogurt vs Store Bought Yogurt

THE PROCESS

If you google Instant Pot Yogurt, you will get approximately a thousand options. I went with one of the first links that popped up from Simply Recipes. I’ve used recipes from there before and they’ve been good, so I felt comfortable trying their Instant Pot Yogurt.

The first step was to get the ingredients, of which there are only two: milk and yogurt. Once you’ve made your first batch of yogurt, you can set aside some of that for the next batch. But for this first batch, I decided to go with what I could easily get at the store: a half gallon of regular whole milk and the smallest container of plain yogurt I could find.

The next step is to pour the milk into the inner pot of your Instant Pot. I started with just a half gallon since I didn’t want to waste a whole gallon on something that I might mess up, but you could definitely fit a gallon of milk in a 6 quart Instant Pot.

Here was the trickiest part for me. The directions I was using kept talking about the “adjust” button to use to get the milk boiling, but I couldn’t find that anywhere. I tried pressing a variety of different buttons and finally, without any help from Google, figured out that if I pressed the “Yogurt” button twice, it would make it boil. It took about 30-45 minutes for it to come to a boil, and at that point, I turned the Instant Pot off and stuck an instant read thermometer in the pot.

You want the milk to come down to about 116 degrees before you stir in the yogurt starter. Once it’s at the right temperature, you whisk together a couple tablespoons of the yogurt with some of the warm milk in a bowl, then whisk it all together.

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