The Easiyo is something most Australian’s would have walked past in a supermarket aisle and dismissed as gimmicky. I’ve done it myself. On and off over the years I’ve glanced at the display of packet yogurt and thought there was no way powder yogurt could possibly be any good.

A while back one of my friends took the plunge and bought the Easiyo yogurt maker. Honestly it became annoying how he wouldn’t stop raving about how great and easy to use it was.

I’d been feeling kind of guilty about my lunches at work and was after a replacement for the ridiculously expensive Milo yogurt I’d been eating with each lunch. Pushing nearly $7 for  1.2kg of mini pack tubs I knew I was getting massively ripped off. I’d tried the other chocolate brands of yogurt and nothing came close.

After a month or so of my friend going on and on about his homemade yogurt I finally decided to do some research. Deciding that the initial outlay for the unit was pretty much risk free I finally caved in one night and decided to get an Easiyo for myself.



The cost

At $20 the Easiyo was a self contained system. I wound up buying some elcheapo tubs from Ikea to store the yogurt in (they were like $2 for 3) so equipment wise my outlay was $25, or just over 3 weeks of eating Milo yogurt.

The yogurt itself is sold in the form of packets. One packet is designed to make 1L of yogurt and prices range from about $3 for plain to $3.50-$4 for the flavoured varieties. This is already about half the price of milo yogurt so it didn’t take long for me to get in front.

If you want to squash the price of yogurt further you can buy box packs of three sachets of plain yogurt and flavour this yourself. This is what I wound up doing. The only retail place I found selling the boxes was BigW and it was about $7 which worked out to about $2.30 for a L of yogurt.

easiyo-yoghurt-in-tubsI’d split the 1L of yogurt out into four days which wound up being 250L or so of yogurt a day (this sure beat the crappy 2x100ml Milo tubs hassle). To flavour I’d simply add a tablespoon of flavoured jam when I rationed out the yogurt into the Ikea tubs.

At a guess I’d say I went from spending over $6.50-$7 on yogurt to about $2.40 a week.

There’s a cheaper option still in which you can save a few tablespoons of yogurt from your current batch and use it to start a new batch of yogurt using milk powder instead of the Easiyo sachets. I’ll write more about this in a future post.



Using the Easiyo yogurt maker

I don’t mind spending hours in the kitchen if I feel like I’m cooking something complex but when it comes to yoghurt I don’t want to be stuffing around with regulating temperature and hunting down appropriate jars or tubs or whatever to make yoghurt in.

When it comes to basic foods I’m lazy and if it’s too hard I won’t bother.

Thankfully using the Easiyo is dead simple.

Equipment wise you have the big thermos, a 1L jar for mixing the yogurt and a removable red circle thing that sits in the thermos and holds the jar in hot water.

First you half fill the jar with cold water and then empty a powdered yogurt sachet into it.

pouring-easiyo-satchet-into-jar

Whack on the lid, shake till mixed and then fill the rest of the jar with cold water. Shake again to mix it all up.

easiyo-jar-full

Now with the red holder thing inside the thermos, fill it up to the top of the holder with boiling water.

easiyo-thermace-full-of-water

Then simply place the jar in the holder.

easiyo-jar-in-thermace

Screw on the thermos lid and leave for a minimum of 8 hours.

easiyo-yoghurt-maker

Easy.



The taste

easiyo-yoghurt-readyI’m by no means a yogurt connoisseur but I do know the difference between crappy and good tasting yogurt. Despite my initial doubts the Easiyo delivers; quite simply put the preflavoured strawberry variety is some of the best yogurt I’ve ever tasted.

I’ve found the longer you leave it sitting (the longest I left it was 16 hours) the thicker and creamier the yogurt gets. I’m a big fan of greek style yogurt so I like my yogurt, flavoured or otherwise, to be of a similar texture.

So far I’ve only had one problem with the Easiyo and that was with the vanilla flavour. I don’t know whether it was a bad batch (I don’t like vanilla enough to try again) or just how the vanilla flavour turns out but when I made Vanilla Easiyo it came out more like a custard and was quite ‘slimy’. It tastes fine but the texture was like custard you’d put on fudge cake which was disappointing.

Every other flavour I’ve tried has delivered consistently perfect results, my favourite being the strawberry.



Health benefits

Straight up I eat yogurt for the taste although I do appreciate the health benefits it brings too. I’m not exactly sure of the science behind it but from what I understand the yogurt powder with bacteria is freeze dried and reactivates once added with water.

How this works I don’t know (If fish tanks taught me anything adding chlorine water to bacteria was a surefire way to kill it), but over a period of 8 hours the bacteria does its thing and your left with yogurt.

Obviously being fresh you’ve got a much higher concentration of live bacteria in the yogurt then store bought stuff which from what I understand is mostly devoid of live bacteria by the time you wind up eating it.

One thing I did wonder about is that when using city water there’s nothing to worry about but if you’re on well water or some other form of untreated water you should probably boil the water and let it cool before making yogurt with it.

As the Easiyo thermos provides an ideal habitat for the yogurt culture to multiply and thrive I imagine if there’s any nasties in your water they too will have thrive and you could wind up with highly concentrated soup of yuck.


For $2.40 or so a week I was able to enjoy yogurt 4 days a week at work in a generous serving. Considering even 1L plain flavoured yogurt tubs cost about $6, over the longterm this was a good saving and it didn’t take long for the Easiyo thermos to pay itself off.

Whether you like plain yoghurt or flavoured, greek or diet I can’t recommend the Easiyo system enough. If you’re interested in no fuss dead easy homemade yogurt this is definitely the way to go.



Related posts that might interest you:
  1. Making Easiyo on the cheap: milk power + yogurt base