Making Homemade Yogurt in a Rice Cooker

After having lots of success making yogurt in my crock pot, I've started feeling selfish.  I have a crock pot, and most people don't.  How will the crockpot-less enjoy fresh, homemade yogurt?  It's basically the same feeling I get when I think about poor kids in North Korea without iPhones.  Such a travesty.

So I set out for alternative methods with the conviction of a Southern Baptist missionary.  Yogurt just needs a warm incubator to ferment for a few hours.  Crock pots work well because of the ceramic insulation that helps keep the yogurt at a relatively constant and warm temperature for 8+ hours.  After clicking around, I found that people use all kinds of crazy methods to incubate.  Oven pilot lights.  Heating pads.  Insulated beach coolers filled with warm water.  Then it occurred to me.  Rice cookers are essentially crock pots.  Everyone in Korea has a rice cooker.  Even if you don't eat rice.  They just come with the apartment.  Eureka~

Making My Own Homemade Yogurt in a Crockpot

There are lots of sites where you can find blog posts, etc. about this, but I thought I'd document how I managed to do it in Korea.  Yogurt only requires milk and bacteria, which can be easily borrowed from a package of existing yogurt.  I taste-tested 5-6 different kinds of plain yogurt, organic and not organic.

WINNER: Denmark Plain Yogurt

It doesn't have a sweet taste from additional sugar that all the other yogurts had, and it has a nice, thick texture which I was hoping would transfer to my own batch of yogurt.  It's also possible to use a yogurt starter to make your own yogurt, but I have no idea where one would get a hold of that in Korea.  And why would you want to go search out something as obscure and difficult to find as yogurt starter when you can go to your local market and just buy some yogurt as starter?