My cousin, who lives near me, recently took a five-day vacation to Japan to check out the cherry blossoms. Before he left, he offered me some dairy products that wouldn't keep until he got back, prime among them fresh yogurt (or here, yoghurt).
As you have probably figured out by now, I am usually up for trying out new snacks, so I said sure. I'd heard about this yogurt before, but hadn't yet noticed it at any of the supermarkets I've been in, so my cousin's offer was particularly convenient.
This isn't your ordinary supermarket yogurt. It's made by some couple who started out producing it just for themselves, in their kitchen, and you can have little glass jars of it delivered to your door once a week if you order the requisite minimum amount. In addition to being "fresh"and "natural," it's also sour, having no added sugar, sweetener, preservatives, or chemicals.
Which isn't a bad thing. It was, however, too sour for me to eat a whole jar without adding a little something, so I decided to fiddle with it a bit. First I tried diced kumquat, and that went pretty well. The kumquat was especially good because since you eat the rind, I didn't have to throw in the citrus flesh, which is juicier and might have made the yogurt runnier than I like.
Then I froze a jar... after all, frozen yogurt is a dessert, right? Um, yeah, that idea wasn't completely thought out, and as you can guess, didn't go quite as planned. The yogurt froze solid, so that it was impossible to get out of the jar. I sort of knew at that point what was going to happen, but was unable to halt the urge to watch anyway. I let it thaw, at which point it turned into yogurt with ice chips -- little cottage-cheese like bits of yogurt suspended in a slush of melting ice. It actually tasted somewhat OK, if watered-down, but the curdled look was too aesthetically unappealing to keep going. I had another jar to get through, after all.
My next attempt was to mix in some honey, which didn't have as much effect as I expected, but maybe I just didn't use enough honey. On the other hand, I don't really like the honey I bought here that much (there are oodles of honeys available at the supermarket, none involving a bear with a cone hat, and I chose something that evidently wasn't clover honey, and it has an aftertaste that I still haven't gotten used to), so I didn't want to overdo it. It was OK.
My plan for the last serving was to mix in raisins and diced apple, but I had some leftover kumquat that was in more dire straits than the apple, so I abandoned the experiment and used my fruit responsibly instead. It's a winning combination. I bet the apple and raisins would be good too, maybe with a dash of cinnamon, even...mmm. Anyway, the yogurt was tasty, but I don't think I'll be signing up for delivery anytime soon -- I like it, but wouldn't want to eat it every day on end. Maybe I'll look more closely at the supermarket....or encourage my cousin to take another vacation.
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