Yogurt making is easy, and is a fun science project for kids and adults alike. It’s cheap, quick, easy, reasonably safe, and fairly useful. Like any real science, it requires mathematical thinking if you want to go anywhere really, but unlike most science, you can get somewhere even without math, and you can eat the experiments. Yogurt making has been done for centuries, and involves nothing more than adding some yogurt culture to a glass of milk and waiting. To do this the traditional way, you wait with the glass sitting outside of any refrigeration (they didn’t have refrigeration in the olden days). After a few days, you’ll have tasty yogurt. You can get taster yogurt if you add flavors. In one of my most successful attempts at flavoring, I added 1/2 ounce of “skinny syrup” (toffee flavor) to a glass of milk. The results were most satisfactory, IMHO.

My latest batch of home-made flavored yogurt, made in a warm spot behind this coffee urn.

Now to turn yogurt-making into a science project. We’ll begin with a hypothesis. I generally tell people to not start with a hypothesis, (it biases your thinking), but here I will make an exception as I have a peculiarly non-biased hypothesis to suggest. Besides, most school kids are told they need one. My hypothesis is that there must be better ways to make yogurt and worse ways. A hypothesis should be avoided if it contains any unfounded assumptions, or if it points to a particular answer — especially an answer that no one would care about.

As with all science you’ll want to take numerical data of cause and effect. I’d suggest that temperature data is worth taking. The yogurt-making bacteria is called lactose thermophillis, and this suggests that warm temperatures will be good (lact = milk in Latin, thermophilic = loving heat). Also making things interesting is the suspicion that if you make things too warm, you’ll cook your organisms and you won’t get any yogurt. I’ve had this happen, both with over-heat and under-heat. My first attempt was to grow yogurt in the refrigerator, but I got no results. I then tried the kitchen counter and got yogurt, and then I heated things a bit more by growing next to a coffee urn, and got better yogurt; yet more heat and nothing.

For a science project, you might want to make a few batches of yogurt, at least 5, and these should be made at 2-3 different temperatures. If temperature is a cause for the yogurt to come out better or worse, you’ll need to be able to measure how much “better”? You may choose to study taste, and that’s important, but it’s hard to quantify, so that should not be the whole experiment. I would begin by testing thickness, or the time to a get some fixed degree of thickness; I’d measure thickness by seeing if a small weight sinks. A penny is a cheap, small weight, and I know it sinks in milk, but not in yogurt. You’ll want to wash your penny first, or no one will eat the yogurt. I used hot water from the urn to clean and sterilize my pennies.

Another thing that is worth testing is the effect of using different milks: whole milk, 2%, 1% or skim; goat milk, or almond milk. You can also try adding stuff to it, or starting with different starter cultures, or different amounts. Keep numerical records of these choices, then keep track of how they effect how long it takes for the gel to form, and how the stuff looks or tastes to you. Before you know it, you’ll have some very good product at half the price of the stuff in the store. If you really want to move forward fast, you might apply semi-random statistics to your experimental choices. Good luck.

Robert Buxbaum, March 2, 2018. My latest observation: what happens if you leave the yogurt to mold too long? It doesn’t get moldy, perhaps the lactic acid formed kills germs (?), but the yogurt separated into curds and whey. I poured off the whey, the unappealing, bitter yellow liquid. The thick white remainder is called “Greek” yogurt. I’m not convinced this tastes better, or is healthier, BTW.