If you want to start making your own yogurts, you need to choose a yogurt maker.
This is not a post about the best yogurt makers that exist in the market – although I’m still going to reference my favorites. The goal of this post is to help you choose a yogurt maker based on your lifestyle.
Yes, a yogurt maker based on your lifestyle, it’s not that big of a decision, unless you’re obsessed with yogurts like me, but there are still some nuances that I’ll talk about on this post.
Before buying a yogurt maker
One of the things that I’d like to point out to you is that you can try to make your own yogurt at home using your oven. This is the perfect solution if you want to dip your toes into yogurt making without the compromise.
Why buy one more appliance if you end up just making yogurt once or twice?
Making yogurt in the oven definitely takes more time so if you do enjoy eating homemade yogurt and tinkering with your recipes, the investment is worth it.
How to choose a yogurt maker
Ok, the truth is that there isn’t a bad yogurt maker – unless it’s broken, all of them do what they need to do – they’re not that complex.
Having said that, there are still some small differences between each types of yogurt machines and that’s why I’m here to help you make the decision.
Here’s what you need to decide on.
Size of the jars
If you want a big jar or several individual portion size jars – I like big containers, it’s less dishes to wash plus that way I don’t feel bad when I eat extra yogurt because there’s no individual portion to remind me that I’m eating more than what I should.
But yes, I do need to put it in a separate jar if I want to bring my homemade yogurt to work.
Material of the jars
You can opt out for plastic or glass. The biggest disadvantage of glass is that you might break them and finding a replacement for some yogurt makers might be difficult
Additional features
I said that yogurt makers are not complex but over the years several interesting features have been added like automatic shutdown of the yogurt maker after making the yogurt or delayed start but these features seem to be overkill.
When you think that if the milk is warm it means fermentation is happening and if fermentation is happening, yogurt is in the making.
Electric vs non electric yogurt makers
Ok it seems easy enough, one uses electricity and the other doesn’t, right? But let me give you some more detail.
All the non electric yogurt machines focus on maintaining the temperature of the still hot milk while electric yogurt machines are always generating heat to keep that temperature instead of focusing on keeping it.
The truth is that non electric yogurt machines are just fancy thermos. That’s the best way I can explain it.
Now that you know everything you need to take in consideration when choosing a yogurt maker, let’s go to the actual yogurt makers.
Best Yogurt Makers
Electric Yogurt Makers
Dash Greek Yogurt Maker Machine
If you prefer to use big jars instead of having individual portions, a yogurt maker with a big capacity is the right move.
The big plus of this yogurt maker is that it has a strainer which you can use to make greek yogurt. No other tools required. I do appreciate having everything in one place instead of fetching something else to strain my yogurt.
MVPower Automatic Digital Yogurt Machine with 8 Glass Jars
This is the most famous kind of yogurt maker. That’s what you see everywhere and you might even remember your grandmother using it when you were young.
You don’t need much more than this, turn it on and you’re good to go. Most of these types of yogurt makes hold between 6-8 cups which are great if you want to have individual size portions to grab and go.
Although I’m sharing this MVPower Yogurt Machine, since these yogurt makers are really common, you might find them used somewhere (if you think that buying used is gross, read this) and save some money in this purchase.
Non-Electric Yogurt Makers
Easiyo
This is my go-to yogurt maker most days, I bought it when I was living in New Zealand because I hated the yogurts there (sorry kiwis!), I’m not a huge fan of cream on my yogurts and most of what I could buy had cream, that’s why I ended up buying this yogurt maker.
And it has been with me ever since.
It’s super practical, it’s basically a thermos with a very hard plastic so it’s amazing to travel.
After buying it, everytime I went back and forth between New Zealand and Portugal it always came with me in my suitcase – yes I’m that obsessed with eating yogurt.
To make yogurt you just need to fill it with boiling water. Ok, so technically you need to spend electricity to heat the water for this one!
But you don’t need to waste water. When I remove the water from the yogurt maker, I use it to water plants or for cooking.
In the initial pack, you only get a 1L container, if you want to have individual portion sizes they’re sold on the side.
YogurtNest
This yogurt maker is made in Portugal! Supporting my own country is always nice and they do have a full English website so don’t worry if you don’t speak Portuguese. You can buy it here.
YogurtNest is made out of cotton and it’s filling has granulated cork, a good material to isolate heat which is pretty important when you’re making yogurt.
The good thing about yogurt nest, is that you don’t really need to have other jars from the ones that you already have. So use whatever jars that you have, huge jars, small jars, whatever fits will work. That’s one of the interesting things about this yogurt maker, if you break one of the jars you can quickly get a replacement.
For me the biggest disadvantage about the YogurtNest is that is a bit too big, especially for those who don’t have much space at home (like me). Fortunately there’s already a smaller version but I still feel Easiyo is more compact for small spaces.
But, at the same time, it can work as a proofing bag or to keep your food warm for a picnic. So it doesn’t only work for yogurt, it’s multi function tool plus is way more beautiful than anything else that I’ve mentioned here.
Choosing your yogurt maker
Now that you all this information, the decision should come easily:
– electric vs non electric yogurt maker
– small jars vs big jars
That’s basically it.
