This is not news – the New York Times and Slate have already been on it – but I’m still astounded at how easy it is to make your own yogurt.

Dairy products that go beyond milk tend to have an air of magic or sorcery about them. Yogurt, in particular, is a little eerie for being alive, and it’s certainly not anything I’d ever heard of my friends or family whipping up at home. Like butter, which I still naively tend to imagine being churned by a Swiss milkmaid in an idyllic meadow somewhere, I always kind of thought yogurt was something that only highly specialized masters could produce – yogurt elves, perhaps, or maybe an Indian yogi who spent all of his time on top of a mountain, meditating in front of a giant lake of milk until fermentation occurred.

Turns out, all you need is regular whole milk and a little commercial yogurt to act as a starter, and you’re off. The methods – they’re really too simple to be called recipes – found via the links above are thorough and straightforward (in brief: warm some milk, stir in some yogurt, cover and let the bacteria do its thing), so I’ll point you to them for detailed directions. My own contribution is simply an extra tip for the warming stage: instead of messing with your oven, which wastes energy and raises the risk of melting tupperwared yogurt into a toxic plastic slurry, wrap your container in a couple dish towels, haul out your slow cooker and dial it to “keep warm,” then sit the wrapped yogurt in the uncovered pot until it sets. Alternately, just set it under a lamp.

I grew up thinking of yogurt as the healthy part of my school lunch, and therefore unappealing, especially as a dessert alternative to cookies and chocolate. But it’s actually one of the most diverse dairy ingredients you can use. To name just two examples, fresh yogurt improves Indian cooking exponentially, and it’s essential for making tzatziki.

My next step will be trying to find out how to make my favourite type of yogurt: the sweet yogurt drinks sold in little clay jars on the streets of China. These amazing little guys are delivered fresh daily and the containers get reused – which may qualify them as the most environmentally friendly products China has to offer. If you’re visiting Beijing, do yourself a favour: get past whatever reservations you have about buying dairy from street vendors (and I know you have them, if only because when I Googled a combination of the words “China,” “Beijing” “yogurt,” “clay jar” “street” “sweet,” etc., only one or two related things came up), buy one, pop a straw through the paper top, and discover a whole other side of Chinese food. This guy loves it; so will you.