Photo Friday: How Much is Inside?
This Photo Friday is inspired by the long-running “How Much is Inside?” series on cockeyed.com, a generally excellent website. It came about on Saturday morning, when I was preparing to strain some yogurt, and I thought “hey, I’ll bet strained yogurt is interesting to other people, too.” Maybe I’m wrong. I guess we shall find out.
I really like strained yogurt. I grew up eating it, and I still eat it pretty much every morning. Now, I actually have a yogurt maker, but the problem with making your own yogurt when you don’t have a car is that you have to haul several large jugs of milk home every week to make enough yogurt for the week (assuming you eat a lot of yogurt, like me). So, I usually buy yogurt at the store. But, storebought strained yogurt is extremely expensive. So, I’ve starting buying Nancy’s, my favourite non-strained yogurt brand, and straining it to turn it into strained yogurt.
When you strain yogurt, you, uhm, stick it in a strainer and allow the whey to drain off. This allows the yogurt to thicken to a delicious texture, while retaining the familiar tangy awesomeness. Seriously, if you haven’t tried strained yogurt, you should. If you let yogurt strain long enough, you end up with labneh, aka “yogurt cheese,” a very dense spread which tastes awesome when you mix it with herbs.
But I didn’t make labneh, I made strained yogurt. And, when you strain yogurt, it loses a lot of its volume, as you might expect, so, without further ado, How Much is Inside a Container of Yogurt?
Straining yogurt starts with emptying a full container of yogurt:
Into a strainer lined with cheesecloth:
It needs to sit for a couple of hours, after which point the formerly towering mound of yogurt looks like this:
(If you’re some kind of food safety fanatic or it is really hot, you should probably refrigerate your yogurt for the Great Straining, but otherwise it doesn’t really matter. Dairy is pretty hardy stuff, especially yogurt, which is highly acidic, and therefore not very friendly to bacteria.)
Here’s all the whey, around one cup, (which can be turned into ricotta):
And here’s the finished product:
Side by side with a full container of yogurt:
So, now you know. Straining yogurt to the thickness I like reduces it by around 3/8 of its volume. And, incidentally, straining your yogurt at home is still cheaper than buying Fage, the only commercially-produced strained yogurt Harvest carries, since a container of Fage is around $5.00, and Nancy’s hovers around $3.00, and when it’s done straining, the Nancy’s is about equal to a container of Fage. (I would illustrate this visually, except I didn’t have an empty Fage containers lying around, so you’re just going to have to believe me on this one.)
Tags: Food, photography