Our Favorite 'non-Greek' Yogurt

Natural, un-strained yogurt is what we love to eat; plus a refreshing yogurt soup...

Among my fondest childhood memories are summer afternoons under the shade of our fig tree, my father just up from his siesta drinking coffee, as the yaourtas (the yogurt man) came to deliver the red clay bowls of freshly made yogurt, not yet completely cold.

Don’t get me wrong; what people call ‘Greek Yogurt’ today, the strained, thick commercial stuff has its place in our kitchen.

For example it is used for the refreshing, delicious and fragrant yogurt soup with cucumber and aromatics that our guests love!

In my childhood summer afternoons, I recall my mother rushing to the kitchen to bring back yesterday’s cleaned pots, which our yogurt man placed at the top shelves of his tin, two-doored cupboard with a handle at the top for carrying. With his cupboard/briefcase brimming with freshly made yogurt pots covered with parchment paper neatly crimped at the rim, he visited the homes around our neighborhood.

We lived in Patissia, where houses were surrounded by vast gardens, and we often had to chase somebody’s sheep and goats that sneaked into my grandfather’s vast property, parts of which he rented to flower growers. Back then, the area was the outskirts of Athens; now it is completely unrecognizable as it became one of the most densely built parts of the city.

I guess every neighborhood had a yiaourtas, as up until almost the mid ‘70ies yogurt was produced artisanally by the people who raised sheep and goats in the periphery of Athens. They brought their products every day to people’s homes, and the yogurt we got was consumed that same evening. Fresh bottled milk was not delivered to our house, only to the center of the city. We grew up drinking a terrible evaporated milk imported from the Netherlands, I think. It was diluted with equal amount of water and was my daily torture. I was forced to drink it, and immediately got stomach cramps.

I probably was lactose intolerant, but my parents thought I was pretending and there was no way I could avoid drinking that horrible milk which made me suffer throughout  the first hours at school. Evaporated milk is still popular in Greece, although now most people drink fresh, ultra-pasteurized milk.

In my family we followed my maternal grandmother’s rule that dictated a pot of yogurt every evening, with bread or paximadi (twice baked dry bread), and some fruit, for all grownups. Lunch was our main meal, and still is for my family. Yogurt was supposed to be a light dinner, but often it was the dessert, for those who devoured copious amounts of leftover lunch, before getting to it.

That was the family joke. “I wonder why you still have high blood pressure since you never forget to eat your yogurt at night”, my father teased my grandmother, who claimed yogurt was a panacea. She tried to eat less food in general, but she had a great appetite. My grandmother died at 98, with almost all her teeth, and was only mildly senile. As children we had to eat at least a few tablespoons of yogurt every evening, on top of anything else we were fed.

All yogurts are not equal

I don’t remember when exactly we got our first electric fridge –probably sometime in the late ‘60ies or early 70ies– but we never kept pots of non refrigerated yogurt for more than a few hours, as its taste could turn too sour for kids.

Any leftover yogurt was used in cooking or baking: for my aunt’s yogurt cake, or as an addition to greens or vegetable pies, and to accompany any kind of rice pilaf. With strained or natural yogurt I also use make my pink tzatziki-like borani, with beets and spinach.

All yogurts are not equal. We grew up eating mostly sheep’s milk yogurt, often made with a combination of sheep’s with some goat’s milk, as Greek shepherds mix the two when milking their flocks. That yogurt is sweeter and creamier than cow’s milk yogurt which is the most common these days. But its flavor varies greatly according to the seasons.

Late spring and early summer sheep’s milk is bountiful and wonderfully creamy since mothers still produce, but their offsprings, spring lambs, have been slaughtered for the Easter table. This is the time sheep’s milk yogurt is at its best. The flocks graze on the fragrant wild greens and herbs of late winter and early spring, and the milk they produce is truly wonderful.

Later in the summer, as the blazing sun dries everything green and they are fed hay and other commercial feed, the little milk sheep and goats produce is less flavorful, unfortunately, and so is the yogurt made with it. At its best time, full fat artisanal sheep’s milk yogurt has at least 5-6% fat, while cow’s milk is about 4,5%.

The summer sheep’s milk yogurt I buy from our local Tyrakeion creamery.

There is a big difference between the homogenized commercial yogurt of today and the traditional one. There are no stabilizers in the yogurt we used to buy when I was a child, and such natural yogurts are becoming increasingly popular again in Greece.

Traditional yogurt is not thick and has a skin of delicious fat on the surface; we used to fight who would capture more of it in the spoon while eating from the big family-size pots. As you take spoonfuls of the soft traditional yogurt, it separates creating little pools of whey.

If there is left over yogurt in the pot, we immediately place a piece of bread or paximadi next to the remaining yogurt  to absorb the liquid. That bread was always the favorite treat of our dogs who every morning eat not just this whey-soaked-morsel but at least a couple of tablespoons of fresh yogurt for breakfast. In a very enlightening piece, Harold Mc Gee explains the process.

A few years back, if thick yogurt was needed to make tzatziki, for example, cooks would have to strain it, hanging the regular yogurt in a piece of cheesecloth. Artisanal producers sold stragisto (strained yogurt) in the old days, but it wasn’t something one could get easily until yogurt started to be mass produced in the late 70ies.

Who would have thought that this thick kind, named “Greek yogurt” would become a household product in Europe and the US, usually mixed with fruit and with copious amounts of sugar. The most popular of these sweet so-called Greek yogurts are usually low or nonfat, I guess because some northern Europeans and Americans want to continue to enjoy lots of bacon and cheese-laden pizzas along with the ‘healthy’ yogurt…

Getting her James Beard Lifetime Achievement Award last week, the brilliant Ruth Reichl —who’s

La Briffe

is a must weekly reading— said:

"The only way to stay young in life is to always do things you don't know how to do. And doing things you don't know how to do means you're going to fail, but you'll figure it out eventually…"