Yesterday, to help me feel like I was getting back to normalcy from not having a refrigerator, I picked up some plain yogurt at the market and made a batch of homemade yogurt. The experience went without a hitch, but as I was stirring my milk, I contemplated how annoyed I was that I had to buy yogurt to make yogurt. While homemade yogurt is extremely easy and cheap, if I have to keep buying a quart of plain yogurt for $2-something, I think my homemade yogurt might actually be somewhat expensive if I waste the supermarket yogurt (like I did last week with a non working fridge. My yogurt starter for one batch of yogurt ended up costing me $2.50).
Obviously the main ingredient in yogurt are live bacterial cultures. I started wondering how I could grow these cultures safely at my house to make my homemade starter. With a little bit of research, I discovered there is a book called Wild Fermentation that discusses a hundred fermented foods and beverages. It is definitely going on my to-read list!
Upon a bit more research, I found that I can (possibly?) make my own yogurt starter using
chile peppers and/or tamarind (I only know what a tamarind is because they were all over Mexico when I lived there! I never liked the flavor, but I would happily use it to make yogurt!). Here is information on an experiment using the Chile peppers to make a culture. I guess this is very common in India as well. Lastly, I also discovered ant eggs are used to make starter yogurt cultures. Yuck. I will stick to the chile peppers. Maybe I can use my painfully spicy New Mexican Hatch Chiles for this!
Adventure to Whole Life 
I had no idea that you could use chili peppers or ant eggs (WIERD) to grow starter cultures! Have you tried it? When your refrigerator works properly, do you save a bit of your own homemade yogurt to start your next batch?
Haven’t tried the chile peppers yet. Once we got a new fridge, I picked up a single serving chobani plain Greek yogurt cup and used it as my starter. It has given me great yogurt! I made several starter bags from batches here and there and froze them and they work just fine. I am making about 2 quarts every week and each batch is turning out great! If something happens to my starters then I will try the chile pepper method. I won’t be trying the any egg method ever, unless all the yogurt in the world (and chile peppers) go extinct.
I would love to know how it turns out with the chili peppers. About to try it myself after I forgot an ran out of my previous batch of yogurt.