How to Make Yogurt in the Instant Pot

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Many people are intimidated to learn how to make yogurt in the instant pot, but the process is almost absurdly simple. There are two ingredients and two active steps necessary to make delicious, nutritious, instant pot yogurt. I’ll show you.

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Instant Pot Yogurt Benefits

Making yogurt in the instant pot is a form of culturing milk. This culturing process inoculates the milk with live bacterial cultures which eat the lactose in the milk. Even for those who have no sensitivity or difficulty processing lactose, by consuming the “sugars” of the milk, the fermentation process makes the yogurt a more digestible form of consuming dairy. It also reduces the glycemic spike that one would get from consuming the lactose in the milk.

The tartness present in a delicious Greek yogurt comes from that good bacteria consuming the lactose and converting it into lactic acid. Lactic acid acts as a natural preservative in fermented foods, from yogurt to pickles to sauerkraut. It helps to lengthen the shelf life of foods by changing their pH.

Lactic acid not only preserves foods and promotes a good environment for that good bacteria to live in your foods, but it helps in clearing bad bacterial overgrowth in the digestive system, and enables the beneficial bacteria to re-seed itself in your intestine.

Culturing your own yogurt at home gives you the opportunity to consume yogurt at a greatly decreased price when compared to store bought yogurt. It also allows you to have control over the ingredients in your yogurt (hint: there are only two!), how long it is cultured, and if you want to get into the science of it, you can even select which strains of beneficial bacteria you inoculate your yogurt with!

In my house we have been making our own yogurt for years. When we got married in 2018 we were given an instant pot for our wedding, and we immediately looked into how to make yogurt in the instant pot. Truth be told, I didn’t even know at the time that yogurt could be made at home, but my husband’s mother had been making it in her oven at home for years, so my husband knew it was possible.

Since then we have tweaked our method to match our yogurt preferences. We like a good, thick, creamy, tangy yogurt! My husband’s breakfast of choice on work days at his welding and operating job is to take a pint sized mason jar, fill it half way with homemade granola, then top it off with homemade instant pot yogurt, and refrigerate it overnight before taking it in his lunchbox for breakfast.

Our kids also greatly enjoy our homemade yogurt, and as they’ve gotten a taste and appreciation for it’s tanginess, they’ve begun to consume more and more. Where I used to make a gallon last two weeks for just my husband, I now sometimes make two gallons in just one week!

Cost of Making Homemade Instant Pot Yogurt

Where I live, a “good brand” of yogurt with minimal added ingredients and no added sugar costs about $6 for 32oz. That’s still 8 ingredients, including mystery ingredients like “natural flavors” which can be alarming if you’ve ever looked into what that can encompass! This particular yogurt is high in protein and low in carbohydrates (yay!) but has ZERO fat (boo!)! As yourself how a thick creamy Greek style yogurt can be naturally achieved with a zero fat content dairy source. Suspicious!

To make my own homemade two ingredient yogurt at home, I purchased a starter culture from Azure Standard, but you can also just use a small single serving store bought yogurt with live cultures. Just be sure that the ingredients list active cultures (it’ll say exactly which ones, if not how much of each) in italics usually at the end of the ingredients list. (Think about that too – that’s usually after the “less than 2% of…” segment on your ingredient label!) So for the cost of a gallon of milk, about $2.50 currently for regular non-organic non-special whole milk, and about $4 or less in a good store bought yogurt, you can make a full gallon (that’s 128oz!) of yogurt.

Let’s break that down again: most store bought yogurt costs $4-8 for 32oz, and there’s junk in it and the live cultures are the lowest quantity ingredient in a low fat product. Homemade instant pot yogurt will cost $6-8 for an absolute minimum of a gallon of two ingredient, fat present, highly cultured, whole probiotic food.

At the rate my family eats yogurt, we would have to buy at least four 32oz tubs per week, approximately $820 minimum per year at a $4 per tub price. Since subsequent batches of yogurt don’t need you to keep purchasing a starter culture, they each cost the same as a gallon of milk. So a gallon of milk costs $2.50, so an equal amount of homemade yogurt costs just $135 per year to make. Saving $685 per year on something as simple as yogurt is kinda wild, guys.

Instant Pot Yogurt Ingredients

I’ve just broken down the sourcing of ingredients a little, so this part is easy. I simply have two recommendations for making your homemade Greek yogurt in your instant pot.

This is all you need:

• milk (whole)
• starter culture

The quality of your ingredients will have an impact on your resulting yogurt. Using a full fat whole milk is important. You could even add a bit of cream or half and half to your milk to increase the fat content.

Your starter culture is important. You can buy a powdered dehydrated starter culture from Cultures for Health or a similar brand. Or you can choose a good store bought yogurt with maximum live cultures and use a portion of that yogurt as a starter culture. I have done it both ways, but I usually just use a store bought yogurt to inoculate my milk. In fact, I only recently bought a powdered starter culture for the first time to try it out, and before that I had exclusively used existing yogurt as a starter.

If you choose to use a store bought yogurt, the only one I really recommend is Stonyfield brand. Their yogurt is made with organic whole milk, and it has very few ingredients compared to most other brands. It also has six varieties of live cultures listed on the ingredients label while most other brands have one or two, sometimes three. I have had great success with this brand, and if we ever have to eat store bought yogurt this is the brand I’m happy with my family consuming.

If you choose to use a powdered starter culture, I recommend NW Ferments Greek Yogurt Starter. I purchased mine through Azure Standard. That cost about $13 so it is definitely a more expensive way to begin, but you’ll be getting a really top quality product. I’ve also heard great things about Cultures for Health brand, but I haven’t used them. I have also used the Yogourmet Yogurt Starter brand that I purchased through Amazon. I tried that one when it was on a steep sale, but as it’s normal price is the same as NW Ferments or Cultures for Health (at the time of writing this) I would personally recommend those brands over the Yogourmet. Their culture worked but it definitely made for a thinner, runnier, less tangy yogurt which just isn’t our preference.

Process: How to Make Yogurt in the Instant Pot

Obviously, to make this instant pot yogurt recipe, you will need an Instant Pot. I have only ever used my 6qt Instant Pot Duo which has a built in yogurt function. This was gifted to us as a wedding gift in 2018 and it has stood the test of time. Well, actually it is our second instant pot of the same model, because I once picked it up by the lid handle in just such a way that the lid twisted and disengaged from the pot, effectively throwing the whole pot across the room, which damaged both the inner pot and prevented it from sealing ever again, as well as damaging the exterior of the outer pot significantly. Since I am a regular instant pot user, I replaced it with a used one I found on Facebook Marketplace at a great price, and this second one has served us well for years now!

I use my instant pot enough that I have also purchased additional sealing rings for it. I mention this here because even when washing these silicone rings well, they can sometimes get a slight aroma of the meats or more fragrant foods you may pressure cook. I have had the unfortunate experience of making a gallon of yogurt only to infuse it with residual corned beef scent. So now I simply have a different color of ring for various things: clear for rice and pasta, red for meats, and blue for yogurt ONLY. At $9 for three rings this was absolutely worth it to us!

Our instant pot also doubles as our air fryer by purchasing an air fryer lid (which is costly but also minimizes our additional large countertop appliances). It also doubles as an electric dehydrator, so I’ll soon be purchasing this dehydrating rack for my instant pot just to make it all more efficient. (There are also a couple more affordable off-brand air fryer lid options on Amazon.)

The process of inoculating your milk with your starter is simple:

• Pour 1/2 gallon to 1 gallon of milk into your instant pot
• press the yogurt button until it says “boil”
• allow the milk to boil until it beeps and says “yogt” signaling that this step is done
• open the pot and remove the inner pot to allow the milk to cool to 100F-110F
• stir the yogurt starter culture or retained portion of a previous batch (about half a cup) into the warm milk until it is dissolved
• replace the inner pot into the instant pot, place the lid, and press the yogurt button to set a time for culturing
• many people select 8-12 hours but I ferment for 24 hours for maximum benefits and because it cultures into a thicker Greek yogurt
• after 24 hours (or whatever time you set) the pot will beep and say “yogt” again and you can remove the inner pot and chill the yogurt in the fridge for a few hours or overnight – it thickens more as it cools
• pour yogurt into mason jars to store in your refrigerator (I use two half gallon jars with plastic lids)
• save a half a cup of your yogurt to be the starter culture for your next batch of yogurt and repeat the whole process when you’re ready

This process really couldn’t be more simple. The amount of active participation time is so minimal – two minutes to pour the milk, set up to boil, remove from boiling, and add in the culture. The boiling time and culturing time do take a while but all of that is passive time that you will certainly be accomplishing other things.

Serving Instant Pot Yogurt

We love to eat our homemade yogurt with all sorts of things, from homemade granola, to jams and preserves, honey, fruit, nuts, chia seeds, peanut butter, you name it. This yogurt is amazing for smoothies with all your favorite add ins! Our go-to recipes usually include brown bananas, frozen raspberries or blueberries, chia seeds, and sometimes peanut butter.

Homemade yogurt is also great for making sauces and dressings like Tzatziki sauce, or to make baked and fried recipes like naan or yogurt bread. Yogurt that is unsweetened and unflavored can also double as sour cream in some recipes, like a beef stroganoff or a creamy soup.

Check out my short video on YouTube showing how I make this yogurt in my Instant Pot! Find us @thewelderandhiswife!