Drinking Yoghurt Recipe

If you have a yoghurt maker, making delicious drinking yoghurt for the whole family couldn’t be easier. This drinking yoghurt recipe is the perfect solution if you want to add yoghurt to your child’s packed lunch – no spoons needed! It’s also delicious on breakfast cereal and muesli and is perfect for making into smoothies and milkshakes.

For general points about yoghurt-making please see my Homemade Natural Yoghurt Recipe.

The type of yoghurt and fromage-frais targeted at children for use in lunch boxes and when out and about are expensive, overly sweet/flavoured and often packaged in difficult-to-recycle packaging. Their only benefit is convenience, so imagine my delight when I discovered my beloved Seb Multi-délices yoghurt maker also comes with plastic, screw-top pots designed for just such use.

However, you do not need purpose-made bottles – you can make drinking yoghurt in your usual pots/tubs and then decant it as necessary into individual ‘Tuppaware’-type drinking vessels for packed lunches. I usually make the six bottles plus a tub of drinking yoghurt which I pour into jug to store in the fridge.

Drinking Yoghurt Recipe

Only three ingredients and five minutes of your engaged time go into this super-simple recipe.

Starter

You will need a ‘starter’ yoghurt for your fermentaion, which needs to be a plain, unsweetened natural yoghurt containing live cultures. Use one of your own homemade natural yoghurts, or buy one. 120-150g will be sufficient to culture up to 2 litres of drinking yoghurt.

Unlike for eating yoghurts, a low-fat starter yoghurt will work very well for drinking yoghurts, generally providing a thinner (more drinkable) result. Do make sure your starter yoghurt just contains milk – no thickeners, sweetners, etc – and mentions containing live cultures.

Alternatively you can use the leftover whey from straining plain yoghurt to make ‘Greek’ yoghurt. This is a great way of both using up your leftover whey, and not using up your starter yoghurt for your next batch of eating yoghurts. Use approximately the same quantity of whey as you would yoghurt.

This recipe does not create a starter yoghurt itself, so you need to plan for that.

Milk

For making your own yoghurts you must use UHT milk, not fresh milk. Use it straight from the cupboard at room temperature. Whole milk will make your yoghurts too thick to drink, so use semi-skimmed for this recipe.

Sugar

One of the best parts about making your own drinking yoghurts is of course that you can make them as sweet (or not) as you and your family prefer. Experiment to find what works for you.

I use white sugar for these drinking yoghurts, but there’s no reason you couldn’t use brown sugar.

Drinking Yoghurt Method

Jump to the brief, printable recipe

Tip your starter yoghurt or whey into a large bowl or jug.

Add your preferred amount of sugar to the yoghurt (see Notes).

Gradually add the required quantity of milk (see Notes), starting with just a little, and stir very well until all the sugar is dissolved.

Pour or ladle the mixture into your bottles/tub.

Place the drinking yoghurts into your yoghurt maker, following the manufacturer’s instructions.

Set the yoghurts to ferment for 6 hours.

At the end of the fermentation time, cool the drinking yoghurt for about half to one hour on the kitchen side, then cover and refridgerate for at least three hours before serving.

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For more yoghurt recipes including flavoured drinking yoghurts, please see my Homemade Yoghurt Recipe Roundup.