Here’s a simple post for a simple recipe to make your own yogurt. You can do this! You want to do this! There’s something deeply satisfying about homemade yogurt—the making of it, and above all, the eating.
Your yogurt can be as thin or as thick as you like; thickening is achieved by straining the yogurt. I always make some of each: thinner for using as an ingredient in other dishes or eating a lovely, pure bowlful; thicker for spreading and pairing with just about every other Lebanese dish there is. It’s our crème de la crème, our flavor-maker, the delight of every plate.
Homemade yogurt; Lebanese laban
My Sitto and my mother and many other a Lebanese cook rinse the pan out with cool water before pouring the milk in, to help prevent burning the milk. I do not know if this practice is effective, but it is not mine to question. Read additional tips on making yogurt here.
½ gallon milk (skim, 1%, 2%, or ideally, whole organic milk)
¼ to ½ cup yogurt (rawbi, plain yogurt with live active cultures; ideally whole milk), room temperature
Heat the milk: Rinse a large heavy saucepan (3-quart or larger) with cool water. Add the milk, and if using, clip a digital thermometer in the pan. Bring to just below a boil (210 degrees) at medium low heat, about 15 minutes. Stay nearby, because the milk will froth up and as it begins to boil it will rise up swiftly in the pan. Remove from the heat immediately.
Cool the milk and add the starter: Let the milk cool down to 110-115 degrees, stirring occasionally. If you are not using a thermometer, the equivalent is when your pinkie can just withstand being swirled in the milk for ten seconds. Arriving at this temperature can take an hour. If the milk cools below 110 degrees, gently warm it up to 110-115 degrees. If in this process of reheating, the temperature goes above 115 degrees, wait again until it comes back down to 110-115. Spoon a few tablespoons of the milk at this temperature into the yogurt (rawbi) starter, then stir that starter yogurt into the milk. You will notice a skin forms on the surface of the milk; that can be stirred right in with the starter, or spooned out.
Rest the milk: Remove the thermometer if you’ve used one, and cover the pan. Set the pan aside, undisturbed, in a warm spot for anywhere from 6 to 10 hours, or overnight. An ideal incubator is the oven, turned off (the oven can be heated on the lowest setting for a minute before placing the pan in, just to encourage warmth, but be sure to turn it off immediately).
Chill the yogurt: Remove the pot from the oven. The milk will have thickened into yogurt. Place, undisturbed as of yet, into the refrigerator for 1-3 days to further set the yogurt before eating or straining to thicken.
Congratulations: small batch, handcrafted deliciousness is yours.
Tomorrow, more on straining the laban, and the very many special ways to enjoy eating it.
Print this recipe here. Find my short essay on making laban, published in Saveur, here.
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My grandmother taught me how to make Laban and other Lebanses dishes. Laban and Labanee seem to be the only dish I have tried. I’m going to look into a butcher here in Austin that would prepare Kibbeh meat for me and try making that. I was always told though that my hands are too warm and I would have to keep putting them in a bowl of ice water not to make the meat sour…or something like that anyway. I did used to make the chicken, green beans and rice and grape leaves when my children were little. The grape leaves take patience! I love to cook and love to cook Lebanese food but only cooking for me is boring! If I had a Lebanese significant other then maybe I would give a full Lebanese meal a shot!
Another thought…I use my finger when making Laban and when I can count to 10 without burning my finger then the milk is ready for the starter. I just use Greek Yogurt as a starter rather than the rawbi like back in the day! My how times have changed! When I was little you were very strange eating that strange white “Jello” that smelled funny and tasted weird according to my friends! And now…it’s the rage!
Great article that answered previous questions about “starter”.
Here is my previous exchange:
As a young man I was more interested in the technicalities than the cooking. One day I asked Aunt Doris where “starter” came from. She said her mother gave her some. I asked where her mother got hers. She said her father’s brother’s wife gave mom some. I asked where they got theirs and Doris said something like, I don’t know, everyone has starter!
Then after she cooled down a bit she asked my dad where the starter came from originally. He thought for a minute and said well you can make your own starter using Junket tablets you know. (In the back of his grocery store were canning supplies and other seldom sold items, Junket tablets were always there but to this day I don’t think dad ever sold any).
So, assuming this Laban (Labne, labneh, yogurt, yogurt cheese) is the same sort of “labon” that my grandparents made (it has to be actually) it is good to know that the starter can come from a number of places.
As a young man I never cared much for it but would follow my elders in dipping kibbe in it, or the like. My wife, who is not Lebanese, loves it with grape leaf rolls and she makes it by doctoring up regular unflavored yogurt, as another aunt taught her to do. I do recall that as a dressing for cucumber salad, with mint, I liked it a lot more.
Anyway great coverage Maureen, hope you didn’t get hit too hard by SANDY, we were lucky here in Hughesville, Maryland, only lost power for an hour or two (I worked all day Saturday on a generator that we didn’t in the end use at all). I pray for the millions that still do not have power.
best, Jerry
I’ve always heard that the original bacteria that makes the starter work came from the stomach of an animal. They used the stomach of a slaughtered animal as a bag to transport milk and in the process laban and other cheeses were born.
I also understand that if one exposes milk to air wild bacteria will form cheese. Another possibility for the original starter.
I wouldn’t recommend either of these as there were probably thousands of sick people from eating a bacteria that wasn’t beneficial until they found that one that was beneficial and used it as the starter for a thousand generations.
Loved it so much that I learned how to make it. Shocked the heck out of my mother.
Using the pinky finger is how my grandmother (on my father’s side) taught my mother and me to make Laban when I was a child. Frequently though it wouldn’t set. I finally figured out my mother had a “high heat tolerance” and she was “killing” the starter. I could barely count to 4 or 5 when she was testing and saying it was cool enough! When I told her to count to 20 (instead of 10), we never lost another batch.
I am from India, living in USA last 4 decades. I have always made homemade yogurt, like my mom and her mom used to make, everyday. Here is my modified simple recipe that many of my Indian friends use now. No need to wait for 10 – 24 hours! No need to put the yogurt in the refrig for 1-3 days! Here is what I do: one quart 1 or 2% milk in a 2qt corningware or Pyrex bowl. Boil the milk in the microwave. Remove. Cool till 115degF, or till you feel the right temp with your pinky. Add just two tablespoons of room temperature yogurt from last batch. Stir. Cover. Put back in the microwave, since it is warm from your milk boiling. I put a post it with time. Check in 3 hours. Yogurt is set and ready! Put in refrigerator for just few hours. Enjoy. I add 4 tbs non fat dry milk and stir before adding the starter culture. By the way, if I am out of town for several weeks, I keep a few tablespoons of my yogurt in a sealed container in the freezer. When I am back, I thaw in in the refrig and use it for fresh batch of yogurt….I just had to write this since I have seen too many long, involved recipes….drove me nuts!
Laban is the one Lebanese dish that my mother made but wouldn’t eat. In fact I didn’t know of anyone that wasn’t born into the family that would eat it. I’m still stunned that good marketing (and a lot of added sugar) could somehow make it Swedish and popular. We always milked cows and sold the cream. That left the skim milk to be either fed to animals or available for laban. When the cows started slowing production and we knew there would be some time before they would calve again, Dad would put the laban in a cloth bag and hang it from the cloths line until all of the liquid drained. He would then roll it in balls about as large as an egg, put it in a jar and cover it with oil. This preserved it without refrigeration so we were never short. Our family always salted it before we ate it. My cousins always peppered theirs and this was always a debate as to which was better.
Great post Maureen! Once I asked Sitto how leban was first created. She said that in primative times in the middleeast, they used a goat’s stomach to carry liquids when they traveled (through the hot desert) which caused the milk to curdle–creating laban.
Thoroughly enjoy the above comments. Maureen’s writing resonates with us all.
Roger, I have often thought that about the 39 (?) steps involved in curing olives.
How many people died while they were figuring this out over eons?