Make Your Own Yogurt At Home...

...it's good for your wallet and your waistline.

Have you ever considered making yogurt at home? In this article I'm going to discuss some of the benefits of making this healthy snack at home. And the good news is that not only is it better for you than the store bought product, it will save you money as well.

Make Homemade Yogurt Using Your Own Ingredients.

This is one of the key benefits of choosing the homemade route. You will have complete control of what you put in - and just as importantly - what you leave out. Just on that point, have a close look at the ingredients listed on the yogurt packaging next time you're out doing your shopping. Food acids, artificial colors and flavors, preservatives plus the names of a whole lot of stuff I've never heard of graced the packaging last time I looked. But by making it at home, you can choose to add only organic milk and a yogurt starter culture of your choice and that's it!

Sugar (or another sweetening agent) is the other thing which is prominent on the ingredients list of some brands. Making your own will give you much more flexibility when it comes to how much sugar you add. You may like to add a little natural sweetener like honey if you're making it for the kids, or if you like it au naturale (so to speak) you don't need to add anything. Or you can always mix in your favorite fresh fruit or just about anything you can think of - be creative.

Another benefit of yoghurt making at home, is that the probiotics (beneficial bacteria) are more likely to be alive and well when you eat it. There's very little chance of the little guys going missing in the trip from your yogurt makers incubator to your refrigerator. You don't know how old the commercial product is and what the manufacturing process has done to it.

Learn How To Make Yogurt And Benefit Your Budget As Well...

At this point, I was going to put together a very complex and accurate calculation of how much money you could save by making yogurt at home. But the price of milk varies greatly as does the price of yogurt depending on the style and quality you like and how much you buy. So I will make a couple of very rough assumptions.

Lets say that you can one quart of milk costs $1.50 and you can buy one quart of yogurt for $3.00. My back of the envelope calculation tells me that it would cost about $2.00 per quart to make the homemade variety (electricity, washing up costs, re-using some of your previous batch as a starter, etc) meaning you would save about $1.00 each time.

If we assume you and your family consume 5 quarts per week and that you can buy a salton yogurt maker (one of the more low cost machines) for about $25 (plus shipping) online, then by my somewhat dubious calculations, it would pay for itself within about 2 months. After that you would be saving about $20 per month off your food bill.

You'll obviously need to substitute your own figures into the above calculations but you get the general idea. Even if after running through the numbers I found I was only breaking even, I would still be inclined to make yogurt at home for the other benefits I've highlighted above.