Homemade yogourt, Almond milk style! (and make your own greek yogourt)

So, lately I've been seeing lots of make your own yogourt posts on blogs and websites. Awesome.
The basic method is to give your milk (about 4 cups) a little boil then cool it down to a baby bath temperature, then you add 2 tbsp of any yogourt with live bacteria cultures and maintain that warm temperature for 8-12 hours(I put a container in a bowl of warm water, in the oven just below the 150F setting) and taadaaa! Yogourt!

But, I can't have dairy (lactose intoler-boo!) I drink almond milk. It's super yum.  Searching the interwebs for a method of making yogourt with almond milk brings results that generally involve crazy things like making your own almond milk using arrowroot powder to thicken and using yogourt  starters from health food stores. Which is great, but I'm not going to do that. I don't buy those things regularly and I don't intend on doing so JUST to make yogourt. Not when I have store bought almond milk in the fridge and a 90% lactose free yogourt I picked up on super sale. So we improvise.

What I did:
I used 2 cups of almond milk and 1 tbsp of the yogourt
gave the milk a little steam and cooled it down then stirred in the yogourt and transferred it over to a container. Which I placed in my bowl of water in the oven then I just left it alone overnight. (about 12 hours).
When it came out though, it was basically liquid. Almond milk doesn't thicken so well. So I cheated and added some vanilla pudding mix and stuck it in the fridge for a few hours.
That didn't thicken it enough so I decided to switch up my methods and turn it into a Greek yogourt.

Did you know you can make your own Greek yogourt? Seriously, out of any old yogourt, either your home made stuff or that tub you picked up on sale. You see, Greek yogourt is just a thicker, creamier version of the regular stuff. It's just had most of the liquid strained out. Neat huh? All you need is a strainer with a container underneath it (to catch the liquid) and a cheesecloth (fold it in half, twice).  If you don't have a cheese cloth you can also use a coffee filter. I used a coffee filter.

How to make Greek yogourt:
Put your cheese cloth or coffee filter in the strainer, put the strainer in a bowl or over a container to catch the water.
Dump your yogourt in and be patient. Once it's a consistency you like just pour it on back into it's container and put it back in the fridge. Enjoy.

Final results are that while very tasty, the almond milk yogourt is still very thin. Almond milk just doesn't thicken. What I'm going to do next time to solve this problem is just use  a bit of corn starch and water boiled into the almond milk to thicken it. Then I'll cool it and carry on as normal. The pudding mix works fine, I just don't like vanilla and would rather it plain.

Let me know how yours turns out.