Yogurt Culture: A Global Look at How to Make, Bake, Sip, and Chill the World's Creamiest, Healthiest Food

By Cheryl Sternman Rule

“Part cookbook, part guide, and 100% inspiring . . . Yogurt Culture will make you fall in love with the tart and creamy stuff anew . . .”—Paste.com
 
Long celebrated as a versatile ingredient in cuisines across the globe, yogurt has recently emerged as a food of nearly unparalleled growth here in the United States. The time has come for a modern, far-ranging cookbook devoted to its untapped culinary uses.
 
In Yogurt Culture, award-winning food writer Cheryl Sternman Rule presents 115 flavorful recipes, taking yogurt farther than the breakfast table, lunchbox, or gym bag. Rule strips yogurt of its premixed accessories and brings it back to its pure, wholesome essence. In chapters like Flavor, Slurp, Dine, and Lick, she pairs yogurt not just with fruit but with meat, not just with sugar but with salt, not just with herbs but with fragrant spices whose provenance spans the globe. She provides foolproof, step-by-step instructions for how to make yogurt, Greek yogurt, and labneh at home, though all of her recipes can also be prepared with commercial yogurt.
 
Rule explores yogurt from every angle, explaining how to read a label, visiting producers large and small, and gaining entry to the kitchens of cooks from around the world. Deeply researched and peppered with stories, interviews, and full-color photographs, Yogurt Culture offers a fresh, comprehensive take on a beloved food.
 
“The most accessible and complete guide . . . Her book made homemade yogurt seem not only easy, but also kind of essential.”—The New York Times 

“A global smorgasbord of tempting recipes.”—NPR.org

“A worldwide, whirlwind tour of the versatile ingredient.”—The Seattle Times

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 28, 2015
• ISBN: 9780544251717

Book preview

Labneh

Copyright © 2015 by Cheryl Sternman Rule

Photographs copyright © 2015 by Ellen Silverman Photography, Inc.

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

www.hmhco.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rule, Cheryl Sternman.

   Yogurt culture: a global look at how to make, bake, sip, and chill the world’s creamiest, healthiest food / Cheryl Sternman Rule; photography by Ellen Silverman.

      pages cm

   A Rux Martin Book.

   ISBN 978-0-544-25232-5 (paper over board) —

   ISBN 978-0-544-25171-7 (ebook)

1. Cooking (Yogurt) I. Title.

   TX759.5.Y63.R85 2015

   641.6’71476—dc23

2014039690

Book design by Rita Sowins / Sowins Design

Food styling by Christine Albano

Prop styling by Marina Malchin

Ebook design by Jessica Arnold

v1.0415

Sweeten and salt your food yourself.

—Michael Pollan, rule #34,

Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual

Although its popularity in Europe and America is fairly recent, yogurt is an ancient food and probably the sole major contribution of the nomadic peoples to the gastronomic resources of the world.

—Ayla Algar, Classical Turkish Cooking:

Traditional Turkish Food for the American Kitchen

Introduction

Flavor

Wake

Dip, Dress, Drizzle, Spread

Sip

Slurp

Dine

Bake

Chill

Lick

Make

Troubleshooting and Frequently Asked Questions

Selected Bibliography

Sources for Specialty Ingredients and Yogurt-Related Products

End Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

Introduction

We didn’t have much. We had a couch my husband, Colin, made by folding a mattress in half and tying a few logs to it with yellow nylon rope. We had a pink, cushy toilet seat my mother-in-law, in a gesture equally well-intentioned and ludicrous, shipped to us in Africa from her home in Dallas. And we had a small kerosene stove, big enough for a single pot, yet small enough to be nudged under that couch if we ever needed more legroom.

Such was our Peace Corps life in Eritrea, the tiny nation where Colin and I spent two years teaching English as newlyweds in the mid-1990s. During our initial months on-site, we experienced many firsts: our first (and last) locust swarm, our first puppy, and our first time bathing in buckets the size of a large pancake.

Over time, we began to hand-make those creature comforts we missed from home. Not just the couch, which served its purpose well until, one day, it collapsed in a spectacular heap, but the foodstuffs that reminded us of our modern American lives. Colin fashioned a reflector oven out of an old cardboard box, some foil, and a few coats of black paint. We bought a second pot—nothing fancy, just the one type of thin aluminum pot sold in every shop in town—and he spray-painted that black, too. He made a basic yeast dough, laid it in the pot, set it in the sun, and hours later—lo and behold—we had bread. It wasn’t artisanal. It didn’t have fancy Asiago cheese or a crackly crust, but it was bread, and he had made it in a pot, in a box, in the sun.

It wasn’t long after that that we made our first yogurt. Yogurt, rug’o in the local language, was a staple in every tea shop; served with bread and a spicy tomato sauce, it was the star ingredient in a piquant, creamy dish called fata. So it wasn’t tough for us to procure some yogurt to use as a starter.

Our early yogurt-making efforts were disappointing; it took a few tries before we got it right. (The reflector oven concentrated the heat way too much, for starters.) But that black pot, with its black lid and a nice, big towel, created a fine incubator of ideal temperature when set in a sunny spot out on the ledge in front of our house.

A tart, creamy ingredient, beautifully pure in its own right.

After that, we made yogurt all the time. Sweetened with sugar or with honey or served plain as a coolant to the spicy Eritrean stews we were just learning to make ourselves, we always had a batch working, ready to go. And we promised ourselves, and each other, that when our Peace Corps service ended, we’d continue making yogurt forever.

We didn’t, of course. Not for fifteen years.

But I’ve started again. And now I can’t stop.

A Versatile Superstar

Yogurt isn’t new. Not even a little. In fact, it has been around since Neolithic times, when the people of Central Asia discovered, most likely by happy accident, that fermenting milk made life easier by increasing fresh milk’s longevity.[1] Most trace this discovery to nomads who transported milk in goatskin sacks, which served as warm incubators in which the fermentation process first occurred.

Sure, in the past few years, a near maniacal Greek yogurt craze has swept the United States, reigniting the industry, but this is not a modern food. It’s ancient, historical, widespread, mythical,[2] healthful, versatile, and—perhaps above all—delicious. No longer is yogurt a fuddy-duddy, hippie-dippy half-solid relegated to 1970s commune culture; it’s an economic superstar, a craveable commodity whose newly chic appeal has won over celebrities, power lifters, professionals, parents, kids, and shoppers of all stripes and all backgrounds. This sky-high interest has forever changed the look of the dairy aisle.

Yogurt has legs now; it’s standing up tall and marching far, further than the breakfast table, further than the lunchbox, further than the gym bag. But it has further to go still, and that’s where this book comes in. In the pages that follow, I strip yogurt of its premixed accessories and bring it back to what it used to be: a tart, creamy ingredient, beautifully pure in its own right, one that can be paired not just with fruit but with meat, not just with sugar but with salt, not just alone but in combination with hearty grains, crunchy vegetables, protein-rich legumes, intense chocolate, fresh-squeezed juices, endless herbs, and exotic spices whose provenance spans the globe.

Herein, I offer you a look back, a look ahead, and a look across world cultures, all with the goal of broadening your understanding of what yogurt is at its most naked and how you can dress it up and customize it at home, in your kitchen. You’ll learn to take advantage of the hidden potential that plain yogurt—the kind you make yourself or the blank-canvas kind you’ll find in larger tubs in any grocery store—has to offer and start to wean yourself from the little fruity containers that have but a single use. (Eat, toss.)

Let’s begin at the beginning.

A Global Yogurt Culture

Yogurt’s precise temporal and geographic origins remain hazy, but sources agree that cultured milk products have been around for thousands of years. In the warm climates of Central Asia and the Middle East, thermophilic (heat-loving) bacteria in the environment would ferment the natural sugar (lactose) in the standing milk of domestic mammals, chiefly cows, camels, and goats, but also sheep, buffalo, yaks, and more. This fermentation process metabolizes milk’s lactose and produces lactic acid as an end product. In so doing, it coagulates the milk’s proteins, drops its pH, sours its taste, preserves its longevity, and increases its digestibility.

Early documentary evidence points to nomadic medieval Turks as especially early yogurt eaters, and in fact, the etymology of the word yogurt itself harkens back to the Turkish language. Fast-forward to the sixteenth century, when yogurt spread to France. Legend has it that when the French monarch Francis I fell ill with intestinal distress, an Ottoman sultan named Suleiman the Magnificent dispatched a physician to cure the king with yogurt. Apparently, it worked.[3]

Despite its presence in French lore and its widespread propagation and consumption as a dietary staple in countless home kitchens throughout Turkey, Greece, Syria, and the Near East as a whole, yogurt didn’t really catch on in Western Europe as a consumer food until the early 1900s. In 1907 the Russian-born scientist Élie Metchnikoff, who was working in Paris, discovered that rural Bulgarians enjoyed unusually long life expectancies. He credited their longevity to avid yogurt consumption and put forth the exciting theory that yogurt’s bacterial cultures could combat the natural effects of aging.

Ah, Greek yogurt. Two magic words that lit a fuse.

Yogurt took on fresh life at this point. Newly valued as a health tonic, the ancient food, not yet produced at scale or marketed in any way in Europe, received a major boost. Then, in 1917 or 1918, Greek-born Isaac Carasso, who’d learned the art of yogurt making in Switzerland, immigrated to Barcelona to reconnect with his family’s Spanish roots. While there, he encountered children who suffered from digestive problems due to poor diet and the unhygienic conditions endemic during the rough economic years of World War I. Motivated, he saw an opportunity to make yogurt commercially, in part to help combat these scourges, but also (presumably) to make some money as a businessman. In 1919, he founded Danone, a company he christened after his son Daniel.[4] (Danone is the Spanish diminutive of the name Daniel.) To read a more complete account of Danone and its later American incarnation, Dannon.

To provide a more intimate snapshot of how yogurt is consumed around the world, I’ve interviewed yogurt-lovers from vastly different backgrounds. You’ll learn from home cooks and culinary pros with roots in Afghanistan, Eritrea, Greece, India, Iran, Israel, Lebanon, Mongolia, Pakistan, Serbia, and Turkey.

I hope these small windows into other cultures will bridge the still-wide gap between how myopically many of us view yogurt—presweetened in disposable, single-serving cups, bottles, pouches, or tubes—and the versatility with which plain yogurt is enjoyed globally in countless incarnations and preparations, both savory and sweet, across every meal. Many of my sources were generous enough to share a nation-specific recipe or two as well, so you’ll enjoy an embarrassment of culinary riches, both mine and theirs, throughout these pages.

Labneh Spheres Preserved in Olive Oil

Yogurt Today—A Dairy-Aisle Coup

We glanced at the past; now let’s look to the present and the future. What does the yogurt market look like here in the United States? And is what you’ve noticed in your local dairy aisle—that yogurt occupies a greater proportion of shelf space than ever before—borne out by the numbers?

On July 17, 2012, the blog of Fortune Magazine/CNN Money reported that Yogurt’s growth has outpaced the rest of the U.S. food industry.[5] The April 2013 issue of Dairy Foods includes a graph showing that yogurt production in 2012 topped 4.4 billion pounds.[6]

So let’s break it down. At the time of this writing, according to the market research firm Mintel: Yogurt sales have grown for five consecutive years from 2009 to 2013; in 2013, sales topped $7 billion; by 2018, sales are anticipated to top $9 billion; and yogurt sales are driven primarily by exceedingly strong demand for Greek yogurt varieties.[7]

Ah, Greek yogurt. Two magic words that lit a fuse.

In 2005, when Turkish-born businessman Hamdi Ulukaya took out a loan to buy a 90-year-old Kraft Foods factory in New Berlin, New York, he took the first step toward upending an industry dominated to that point by corporate giants Dannon and Yoplait (now part of General Mills). Greek yogurt wasn’t unheard of when Ulukaya entered the game, but the primary player at the time—Athens-based Fage (FA-yeh), which had started importing its yogurt from Greece—had failed to transform the industry the way Ulukaya came to do at breathtaking speed. Ulukaya, who’d spent a few years selling feta through his company Euphrates, branded his new Greek yogurt business after the Turkish word for shepherd (çoban), calling it Chobani.[8] As further evidence of Chobani’s impact on the economy, Ulukaya was invited to ring the closing bell of the NASDAQ in January 2014.[9]

Burnt Sugar–Apricot Halves

Soon Greek yogurt was red-hot. It wasn’t long before both larger players with more infrastructure and name recognition, and smaller, independent upstarts, caught wind of the public’s rabid interest in higher-protein yogurts with an ultracreamy mouthfeel and an appealing health profile. The number of producers swelled, and sales boomed. Mintel’s report shows that for the year ending May 19, 2013, Dannon’s Oikos brand of Greek yogurt led the market in terms of sales, enjoying a single-year increase of 164.7%.

The media, for its part, loves covering the yogurt wars (as more than one major news source dubbed it),[10] which creates great buzz when things go well and new product lines launch but stings hard when companies falter, as Chobani did when it issued a large recall in September 2013.

Yogurt appears almost daily in food news. Whole Foods Market created a firestorm in December 2013 when it announced it would no longer carry Chobani to make room for more product choices not readily in the market, according to a 2013 tweet on the company’s Twitter account. The 2014 Super Bowl featured ads for both Chobani and Dannon’s Oikos brand. And celebrities—from Bobby Flay (Fage) to Michael Symon, John Stamos, and Reba McEntire (various Dannon subbrands) to Hugh Acheson (Liberté)—have partnered with major brands, all of which keeps yogurt in the spotlight.

What drives yogurt manufacturers’ sales and marketing? How do they come up with their flavors? How do their factories actually work to make yogurt day in and day out? What makes them tick, makes them special, makes them distinct from their competitors? In 2013 I visited the New York headquarters of Dannon, the Vermont home of Commonwealth Dairy, and the California hub of Straus Family Creamery. These first-hand accounts, as well as recaps of my interviews with representatives of Smári Organics, goat yogurt maker Redwood Hill Farm, and New York–based Blue Hill Yogurt (which makes vegetable-flavored yogurts), provide insight into the sheer diversity of players driving demand and innovation in the yogurt category. Individually and collectively, they’re all contributing to today’s yogurt zeitgeist.

And that’s just fresh yogurt. What about the frozen stuff? As the refrigerated yogurt market thrives, frozen yogurt keeps pace beside it, with shops popping up at breakneck speed. (Sales increased from $279 million in 2011 to $486 million in 2013.)[11] From self-service kiosks on college campuses to proliferating frozen yogurt chains offering endless toppings—think Fruity Pebbles, sour gummi worms, and cheesecake bites—fresh and frozen yogurt have both blossomed and veered off in sometimes outlandish directions.

I’m not just talking about hypersweetened yogurt tubes in head-scratching flavors like melonberry and cotton candy (produced by the pizza giant Chuck E. Cheese’s), but the debut of a frozen yogurt chain called Cups that immediately drew comparisons to Hooters for what the Huffington Post called its boobs-as-ambiance business model;[12] the launch of products like Post’s Honey Bunches of Oats Greek Honey Crunch cereal with an ingredients list that includes Greek yogurt powder and Greek yogurt style coated granola (whatever that is);[13] frozen yogurt treats for dogs (made with vegan carob chips and bourbon vanilla extract);[14] and organic freeze-dried fruit and yogurt drops for babies.[15]

For all its popularity, yogurt risks jumping the shark (if it hasn’t already). In straying so far from its roots, something crucial may be lost forever. I do support product innovation, but I also fear that the wholesome essence of this ancient and remarkably simple food may soon vanish under an avalanche of coatings, candies, powders, and pellets.

What Is Yogurt, Anyway?

At heart, yogurt is milk that has been inoculated with bacterial strains and left to culture at warm temperatures until it thickens. Of course, things are somewhat more complex, so let’s get technical for just a bit.

The live bacterial cultures that create yogurt—specifically Streptococcus thermophilus and Lactobacillus delbrueckii bulgaricus—are thermophilic, meaning they propagate in a warm environment. That’s why you can’t simply stir a spoonful of yogurt into milk cold from the fridge, wait a few hours, and voilà: yogurt. Certain temperature protocols must first be met. (Keep in mind that the protocols vary slightly for commercial yogurt factories versus home yogurt making. I’ll be addressing home yogurt making below, but the broader concepts apply in both realms.) You can find a complete homemade yogurt recipe later in this book, but here’s the basic science.

First, the milk is brought to 180°F. This heating process kills any harmful—and potentially competing—microorganisms that may already be present in your milk, thereby providing a blank slate in which new cultures can grow. (This is also why experts advise against making yogurt from raw milk.) Heating the milk also denatures the whey proteins and allows them to absorb water, ensuring a more stable end product. There are different schools of thought regarding how long the milk should stay at this temperature before cooling, but it’s really a matter of preference. Holding the milk before cooling tends to improve gelation (the gelling process), creating a thicker and firmer texture.

---

Yo!

A 6-ounce serving of yogurt generally supplies between 5 and 10 grams of protein. Greek yogurt typically provides between 10 and 20 grams of protein, or more. Many yogurts also contain vitamin D, which helps the body absorb calcium, and lactic acid, which improves the body’s ability to absorb minerals and digest calcium. Studies suggest that the body is better able to absorb calcium from yogurt than from unfermented milk.

Second, the milk is cooled down to about 115°F (108°F in factories). This is the temperature range at which your starter cultures, once introduced, will thrive. You can cool milk by pulling your saucepan from the heat and waiting, or you can plunge it into an ice bath. If the milk cools too far, it must be rewarmed.

Third, the milk is inoculated with a starter culture.You can use either a powdered (generally freeze-dried) yogurt culture containing live bacteria, or—easier and more practical—a small portion of yogurt from a prior homemade batch or store-bought container. The starter should be fresh—used within a few days of opening, in other words—and must have live, active cultures in order to propagate, so look for these words on store-bought cups.

Fourth, fermentation begins.By maintaining a temperature close to 110°F throughout incubation, the cultures you’ve introduced begin to convert lactose into lactic acid, thereby lowering the pH of the milk and causing it to gel, or thicken, and to take on the sour tang characteristic of plain yogurt. This process takes several hours. Once the pH dips below 4.6 (evidenced by the thick consistency and tangy flavor), transfer the yogurt to the refrigerator. Chill for several hours before eating.

Now you have yogurt.

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Generic Yogurts and the Rise of Copackers

The Story of Commonwealth Dairy

You’ve probably never heard of Vermont’s Brattleboro-based Commonwealth Dairy, one of this country’s newest large-scale yogurt makers. That’s because its name doesn’t appear on the vast majority of its packaging. Instead the company produces private-label yogurt under the Green Mountain Creamery name and also acts as what’s known as a copacker, meaning it produces yogurt for third parties and packages it under those stores’ in-house labels.

A contractual agreement between the copacker and the stores generally prevents the publicizing of the relationship. This opacity may leave customers with the impression that the private labels are produced by the grocery chain itself and/or are exclusive to that store when neither may be true.

Ben Johnson and Tom Moffitt cofounded Commonwealth back in 2011 after working together in the corporate office of Ahold, the parent of the Northeast-based Stop & Shop supermarket chain. Johnson was hired first, and Moffitt was hired as Johnson’s boss soon thereafter. That lasted about two weeks, Johnson said, laughing. The two soon worked side by side.

While employed in Ahold’s private-label division, Johnson says he and Moffitt started researching using their private-label experience to start their own business. Johnson says he realized that the three private-label yogurt manufacturers in the region had become complacent about quality and customer service and suffered from a lack of product innovation. This sparked an idea. We said, Jeez, if we could provide a high-quality product and give great customer service, we knew we could do a lot.

Johnson and Moffitt had never made yogurt, so they knew they’d need a partner not just for investment but to help with technical know-how. They formed a strategic partnership with a German company in the European market, Ehrmann AG.

I asked Johnson about the difference between the yogurts they make in Brattleboro and the yogurt that its partner Ehrmann AG makes in Europe. Is the customer base the same? Is the product? In short, no. The Germans were shocked by

Reviews for Yogurt Culture

[cinderh_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Very nice history of yogurt followed by many recipes. It's nice that you can use homemade yogurt or store bought. There are recipes (and troubleshooting) for making your own yogurt, Greek yogurt, and yogurt cheese, too. I loved that she also had ideas with what to do with the whey after you've made Greek yogurt. The main body of the book is recipes to enhance your yogurt, or recipes that use yogurt in them. They range from breakfast to appetizers, dinner, and desserts, including some smoothies and panna cotta and frozen yogurt. The recipes look simple and the pictures of them will make your mouth water!