Purely Random

I enjoy yogurt. Being a bit of a health geek (okay, a lot of a health geek), I’m partial to the plain yogurt—typically low fat. In fact, every morning, I start my day by enjoying a little plain yogurt with something crunchy sprinkled on top. Sometimes it’s Grape Nuts, sometimes that’s homemade granola, but there’s always yogurt involved. The point here is that I consume quite a bit of yogurt and have been for the past few years. That’s why it’s funny that I’ve only recently made the following discovery: stirring yogurt destroys the somewhat solid texture it’s supposed to have. It negatively impacts not only texture, but the flavor as well.

I discovered this partially by experiment, but those experiments were motivated by a tub of Fage Total 2% authentic greek yogurt that I bought on a whim. First off, you should go buy some Fage right now. You haven’t had real yogurt until you do. They even have it at Giant Eagle, so you have no excuse not to try.

The texture of the Fage was quite different from most yogurt I’ve ever eaten. It’s light and fluffy—far less runny than more heavily processed yogurt epitomized by Dannon All Natural. There’s even a protective plastic lining that presses down onto the surface of the yogurt to collected any separated liquid. When you pull off the plastic, the liquid has a natural tendency to come off along with it. As a result, the taste is a little bit dry—and in a very good way.

At first, I chalked this different texture up to the fact that it was a different kind of yogurt. Maybe greek yogurt is just that way. Then I tried something out with my Brown Cow (plain) Low Fat yogurt. I opened my weekly tub one morning to find the yogurt slightly separated. As is fairly typical, some liquid (presumably whey?) had collected on the surface. Thinking back to my experience with the plastic lining on the Fage, I dumped out the liquid. Normally, I would stir it in and go on, but I decided to try something new. The yogurt kept a little of the structure you find when first opening the package, and it tasted a little bit more like the Fage.

The next day I did the same. Then again on the next, and so on. Each morning, there was a little whey collected on the surface of the yogurt, but I gently poured most of it down the drain (it was less than an ounce or so each time). Each morning, the yogurt was light and more like Fage than I ever expected. In fact, it grew better with each passing day as more and more whey was discarded. It actually reminded me of back in the day when Graham Kerr used to drain yogurt in a cheesecloth to make a kind of fat free queso blanco. That ye oldie Graham Kerr memory probably even helped to motivated the experiment.

So, I’ll repeat and stand firmly behind my original statement: don’t stir that yogurt. I haven’t found any further documentation in the blogosphere or elsewhere (though I didn’t look very hard), so this may already be common knowledge. If it’s not, and you aren’t already doing this with your yogurt, at least give it a try and see what you think. While you’re at it, you should probably give some Fage a try just so you know what you’re missing. They even have flavored varieties for for those of you that aren’t as ridiculous as I am with the all plain all low fat all the time.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 2nd, 2007 at 11:04 pm and is filed under Realizations, Techniques. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.