Labneh

Labneh is one of those things I assumed I had to buy until a friend showed me there’s basically nothing to it. You salt yogurt, you hang it up overnight, and the next day you have a thick, tangy spread somewhere between Greek yogurt and cream cheese. That’s the whole recipe. Two ingredients, one of which is salt.

It’s a Middle Eastern staple, eaten at breakfast, smeared on warm bread, spooned into bowls and drowned in olive oil. I keep a container in my fridge most weeks now. It costs a fraction of what the tubs at the store run, and the texture is better because you control how long it drains.

The only catch is time. You’re not cooking anything — you’re waiting. About a day, sometimes two.

Why it’s worth making instead of buying

Store labneh is fine. But it’s usually strained to one fixed thickness and priced like a specialty item, which it isn’t. When you make it at home you decide whether you want it soft and scoopable at 24 hours or dense enough to roll into balls at 48. That flexibility is the actual reason I switched.

The flavor is cleaner too. A good homemade batch tastes like really, really good yogurt that someone concentrated — bright, a little sour, salted just enough. You’re not getting stabilizers or gums. Just yogurt that lost its water.

And the whey you drain off isn’t garbage, which I didn’t know for an embarrassingly long time. It’s tangy and faintly cheesy and works in smoothies or bread dough or even watering plants. I used to pour it down the sink. (Don’t.)

What you’ll need

This is a two-ingredient recipe so the yogurt is everything.

this now & bake later ❤️

Use whole milk yogurt, four cups, about 32 ounces. Full fat, not low or non-fat — the fat is what gives labneh its body and that slightly buttery edge. Plain, unsweetened, no vanilla. You can use a thick Greek-style yogurt or a looser regular one; the looser kind just drains longer and gives up more whey. I’ve made it with both. Greek gets you there faster.

A note on the brand: skip anything with a long ingredient list. You want yogurt that’s basically milk and cultures. The fewer additives, the better it strains, because gums and thickeners are designed to hold water in — exactly the opposite of what you’re trying to do here.

Kosher salt, three-quarters of a teaspoon. This seasons the labneh and also pulls moisture out, so it’s doing real work, not just flavoring. If you only have fine table salt, use a bit less since it’s denser by volume.

For serving, none of it required but all of it good: extra virgin olive oil, a generous pour. Za’atar, or chopped fresh herbs like mint or parsley. Warm pita for scooping. And sliced vegetables — cucumbers, radishes, peppers — if you want something crunchy alongside.

How to make it

Pour the yogurt into a big bowl and stir in the salt until it’s evenly mixed. That’s step one and it takes about thirty seconds.

Now the draining, which is where the magic actually happens. Line another large bowl with a clean linen or muslin towel, or several layers of cheesecloth folded over. Pour the salted yogurt into the cloth. From here you’ve got two ways to go.

The classic method is to gather the four corners of the towel, tie them together, and hang the bundle from your kitchen faucet so the whey drips into the sink overnight. It looks a little strange dangling there. It works beautifully.

If hanging isn’t practical — and in my small kitchen it usually isn’t — set a sieve over a deep bowl instead, line the sieve with the towel, add the yogurt, and fold the overhang loosely over the top. Park it on the counter or in the fridge. The fridge is slower but safer if your kitchen runs warm.

Either way, let it drain 24 to 48 hours. At 24 hours you’ll have a soft, spreadable labneh, the kind you swoosh across a plate. Push it to 48 and it firms up considerably — that’s the texture you need if you ever want to roll it into balls and store them in oil. I usually pull mine around the 24 to 30 hour mark because I like it soft enough to dip into.

The first time I made it I peeked constantly and kept squeezing the bundle to speed things up, which mostly just made a mess. Leave it alone. Gravity does the job. The longer you can ignore it, the thicker it gets.

When it’s done, scrape it out of the cloth — it’ll cling a bit — and you’re set.

Serving and keeping it

To serve, spread the labneh in a shallow bowl, drag the back of a spoon through it to make a few grooves, and pour olive oil into them. Dust with za’atar or scatter torn mint and parsley. Warm pita and a plate of cut vegetables turn it into a whole appetizer. This is genuinely one of my favorite things to put out when people come over because it looks like effort and took none.

For storage, scrape the labneh into a tight-lid container and keep it in the fridge. Use it like cream cheese — on toast, in sandwiches, stirred into a bowl of roasted vegetables. It holds well for up to two weeks this way.

If you want it to last longer, there’s the olive oil method, and it only works with the firmer 48-hour labneh. Roll the thick labneh into balls about three-quarters of an inch across. Set them on a paper-towel-lined tray, cover with another paper towel, and refrigerate overnight to firm up further. Then pack the balls into a clean jar and pour good olive oil over them until they’re fully submerged, no peeking tops. Sealed and refrigerated, they’ll keep for months. It’s more fiddly than it sounds worth, until you’ve spread one of those oil-cured balls on bread in the middle of winter.

Serves about 8 as a dip. The longer you strain, the thicker — and the longer it keeps.

Print