Sometimes it can be tricky or expensive to find a soy-free vegan yoghurt at the supermarket, even if there is a lot more choice now than there was 10 years ago when I first went dairy free! My youngest child is both dairy and soy intolerant and so making my own soy-free yoghurt has been something I’ve been working on for a while now.
At first I got excited by this pink yoghurt maker, but most of the vegan recipes I found online using one of these involved using soy. I tried several, terrible, failed attempts with cans of coconut milk, before admitting defeat and putting it in the cupboard!
Then I got to thinking – perhaps I was making it harder than it needed to be! I thought about WHY I want to feed my children yoghurt and went from there. So why do we choose yoghurt over other dairy-free-desserts? For me, it was that they usually contained less sugar than other desserts, involved some fruit, they usually had the added bonus of good-bacteria to keep tummies happy and also sometimes involved calcium or were a source of protein.
So, with those goals in mind I reframed what I wanted my ‘yoghurt’ to end up like and came up with 2 awesome yoghurt-y bases that I’m going to share with you today as well as some ideas for customising the flavours how you like. I add probiotics for gut health and use natural sweeteners such as agave syrup or date syrup to make them sugar free. You can use a milk that’s already been fortified with calcium and other minerals, or add your own calcium powder if that’s important to you too.
The first base is made using my Homemade Oat Milk – at about 45p per litre, this makes for some very cheap dairy-free yoghurt! It also is already fortified with calcium. The second can be made using any other shop-bought plant milk you like, I used Koko coconut milk.
Homemade Oat Milk Method:
Ingredients:
- A batch of homemade oat milk (made with the xanthan gum – it’s optional for the milk, but not for yoghurt!)
Method:
All you need to do for this is to thicken the milk by heating it (the magicalness of the oats and the xanthan gum will be activated by the heat) – I did this by blasting it in the microwave for about a minute or so, but you could also do this over the hob. Once it’s the thickness you desire pop it in the fridge to cool (this also obviously also makes a blummin’ delicious custard base if you use it warm! Especially if you add cocoa powder and agave syrup)
Shop-Bought Plant-Milk Method:
Ingredients:
- Plant-milk of your choice
- Xanthan gum – use a ratio of 1stp to about 100ml
Method:
Put the milk in a blender, sprinkle the xanthan gum on top and blend for about 30-40 seconds until it gets all frothy, it’s kinda wibbly a bit like jelly. Well, kinda like if jelly and mousse had a baby! (okay, maybe I’m not really selling it with that description, but trust me it’ll be tasty!)
Now, you simply take your base and add your desired ingredients to it. I like to add a dairy-free probiotic mix like this one and if your milk didn’t contain calcium you could add that too. If you want it to be sweet then agave syrup is fab. For flavours I mostly chuck in some blended or chopped fruit but here are some combos that we love:
- Chocolate Cherry – add cocoa powder to the base and pot up with some cherries (either fresh or these ones pictured were frozen ones that I heated up with some agave syrup and chia seeds to thicken it slightly – like pie filling consistency – and then let it cool again)
- Apple and Cinnamon – Mix in a pouch of apple puree or unsweetened apple sauce and ground cinnamon.
- Banoffee Pie – Sweet Freedom caramel syrup in the base and then potted up with banana slices (could add a squirt of dairy-free squirty cream for extra decadence!)
You can pot the yoghurt/dessert up in cute reusable jars with lids like these ones (which also reduces your plastic waste, yay!) but sometimes I serve mine in a dish with extra fruit (this is apple and cinnamon with blackberries) and cute edible wafer decorations – We’ve got rainbows, unicorns, dinosaurs etc!
Your base can keep in the fridge for 3-5 days, but some probiotic mixes contain prebiotics too and while that is good news for your gut, it is bad news for yoghurt making as they can turn it baaad quite fast. With this in mind I usually wait until I’m serving/making up the yoghurt flavour to add the probiotic powder so that isn’t a problem.
I hope you enjoy making some tasty desserts for you and your little ones and I would love to see what you make, you can tag me @kirstieannewellbeing on Instagram if you want to share with me!
Yoghurt seem like too much faff? Why not try this 5 minute Mug Pudding! Need some more snack-y inspo for your child? Check out my Allergy-Friendly Snack Ideas for Kids❤️
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