Opinion: Irksome yogurt!

I always check labels! But the other day I grabbed some yogurt and didn't look. I think it's a brand I used to use that met my standards of no thickeners, no sweeteners, just milk. 

I know why this happened. My usual brand, Nancy's, had been on sale for a couple of months, but now it was back to the regular price of $5.29 a half gallon. I had been paying a dollar less. So when I saw something nearby on sale, I grabbed it. It was whole milk plain yogurt, and only $4 for 2 quart tubs. Good price.

I use yogurt in my breakfast smoothie every morning. The first day it seemed a little foamy and pasty. The second too. And I didn't like a certain discomfort in gave me after I drank it. So I checked the label. It had as its second ingredient cornstarch! 

I had succumbed to the temptation to go with price over quality, not intentionally but carelessly. 

And what I got wasn't yogurt. True yogurt doesn't need thickeners, which is what the cornstarch is. As is the tapioca in other brands, or the gelatin. 

If the right bacteria are present for the right amount of time, milk will turn into thick yogurt and no other thickener is needed.

Nicely, bacteria also convert sugar into acid, lactose into lactic acid in the case of yogurt. You can read about it here.

So you have helpful bacteria, the kind that coexist inside of us and help us convert food to nutrients, working to ferment milk and convert its difficult-to-digest sugar lactose into lactic acid, which thickens the milk, separating the liquid part from the protein part, whey and curds, through fermentation. 

The result is more digestible milk with less sugar.

Along comes the food industry. In the name of something I can't imagine, it 'improves' on the process and instead gives us a milk product so inadequately fermented that it has to add cornstarch and then to make up for lost sugars, adds sweeteners.

Most yogurts come with added sweeteners, but the label PLAIN helps us avoid those. Nothing on the label helps us avoid the adulterants. For that we need to turn the tub over and squint at the list of ingredients. If it has more than milk and bacteria in it, it's not yogurt. Or not all yogurt.

I confess to being overly influenced by price, even though I realize that good food always costs more than bad. (Fresh spinach costs far more per pound than cookies, even if it's not organic spinach.) So in this frugal mindset, I resent paying for cornstarch when I think I'm paying for a milk product.

Corn is in everything. The government subsidizes corn and we have a glut of it. Cows eat corn to make milk (though they shouldn't - it makes them sick). But it's cheaper to skip the cow and just add corn to milk products. 

I don't want to pay for yogurt that has been 'extended' by cornstarch. Or thickened by it. I don't like the texture - pasty, foamy - and I don't like the idea of it. 

There are only one or two yogurts out there now that are made from whole milk and yogurt-making bacteria and nothing else. Good luck finding them at an affordable price!

Choosing yogurt

Yogurt can be a wonderfully healthy food. But check the ingredients to make sure the yogurt brand in your hand has just yogurt in the container!

Real yogurt doesn't need gelatin, pectin, tapioca, or guar gum. Real yogurt has made the transition from milk to thick, predigested dairy product through the action of one or more types of bacteria that ferment milk sugar (lactose) to lactic acid and cause the milk to thicken.

The conversion of lactose to lactic acid means that those who are lactose-intolerant can enjoy yogurt.

Real yogurt is sour, so the tendency in America is to sweeten it, usually with sugar or an artificial sweetener. Around the world, though, yogurt is eaten unsugared. I will add home-tested recipes for these foods here from time to time. When shopping for yogurt, check the ingredients to make sure it is unsugared.

Real yogurt also contains live bacteria. The milk the yogurt is made from will have been pasteurized, but the yogurt should not have been pasteurized after fermentation, or the good bacteria in it will have been killed. Because of wide-spread interest in yogurt as a healthy food, most brands no longer kill off the good bacteria through pasteurization but brag proudly on the label that they the product contains live bacteria. This is what we're looking for!

In our local farmers' market, we can buy local yogurt from two vendors. Both are whole-milk, unsugared, unadulterated yogurt, one 'greek' (extra-thick) and one regular consistency. In years past, a goat yogurt has also been available - I'll have to check to see if that vendor still provides it on a regular basis.

Yogurt has a good effect on digestion for many people. As a fermented product, it is inhabited by beneficial bacteria and pre-digested by them. You might want to read this Wikipedia article on Yogurt for more information.

A useful book on the value of fermentation and the pre-digesting of foods has been written by Sandor Ellix Katz. It is called Wild Fermentation. Yogurt is just one of a multitude of beneficial fermented foods he talks about.

Simple Summer Smoothie

In the pursuit of unsugared satisfying foods, I have taken to making smoothies again. This one is so easy that it will be ready 5 minutes from now, if you happen to have the few ingredients on hand.

Ingredients:
half a quart container of plain yogurt - I use whole milk organic yogurt
3 ripe peaches
1 frozen banana - if you don't have one frozen right now, use a fresh one

Holding the peaches over the blender as you cut them so you don't lose any juice, remove the seed but leave the skin on. Drop them into the blender with the broken-up banana and yogurt. Whirl on high for as long as it takes to eliminate most of the lumps.

Hints: I use my Vita-Mix so the blending takes less than a minute. To freeze bananas, peel them, break them into chunks with your fingers, and freeze in a pie pan or other flat container where they can spread out a single layer deep. Then once they are frozen, bag them and store them in the freezer till it's time for your next smoothie.