I love frozen yoghurt as a treat and with summer and the warm weather arriving I decided to develop a recipe without sugar so that we could have our pre-workout yoghurt in frozen style.
I actually tried making this in several different ways. The recipe below is the one that won the taste test, but I’ve included comments at the bottom of the other variations that I tried.
Blackberry frozen yoghurt
Ingredients:
1kg plain yoghurt, I use a cheap low-fat one that I’ve found and which is quite tasty, but most recipes recommend a good quality full-fat or Greek variety
400g blackberries
6 tsp vanilla essence
Directions:
- Press the blackberries through a sieve to remove the small seeds and create a blackberry coulis. You may find it easier to zap the blackberries in a blender first to create a pippy-paste before you start.
- Add the vanilla and yoghurt and mix together thoroughly.
- Pour the yoghurt mix into a Tupperware box and place into the freezer.
- Every 30-45 minutes (this will depend a little on how much patience you have and how cold your freezer is) take the box out of the freezer and beat the yoghurt mix thoroughly with a fork to remove the ice crystals. You may find it easier to turn the mix out into a blender and pulse it briefly, or use a hand blender, rather than using a fork. My personal preference is to use a hand blender as I find the fork still leaves the ice crystals a bit too much intact and the result is a watery-flavoured frozen yoghurt.
- Continue this process until the yoghurt is frozen solid but with a smooth consistency. The closer it gets to being fully frozen, the more frequently you will want to take it out of the freezer to beat it.
Despite all this regular blending (or perhaps because I was lazy and stopped blending it before it was completely frozen) I found that it was far too solid a lump when I came to serve it. So solve this I turned it out into a bowl, cut it into a smaller pieces (for the sake of my blender’s motor) and blizted it into a smooth consistency again. If anyone knows the solution to stop it freezing quite so solid then please let me know!
The flavours that lost:
The first of the two alternatives were made with nothing added to the yoghurt and blackberries. This was great but suffered a little from the sharpness of the plain yoghurt which overpowered the blackberries a little. Using the vanilla essence tempers the sharpness enough to allow the blackberry flavour to become more prominent.
The second alternative is done by adding 1.5 tbsp honey instead of vanilla essence to the mix. We were disappointed by the results, perhaps because we rarely use honey now and have lost our taste for particularly sweet foods. All we could taste was honey. It may be that 1.5 tbsp is too much (it was certainly difficult to mix in) and this option may appeal to those of you with more of a taste for sweet foods, but we decided that the vanilla essence one was much nicer and it would be better for us to have no honey in it anyway.
Related posts:
Yogurt is not paleo. In any form or fashion.
http://whole9life.com/2009/07/dairy-manifesto/
JL – Yoghurt is in a very grey area and many paleo people do consume yoghurt, especially those who follow a Paleo diet but who do heavy strength training on a regular basis (and therefore benefit from a post workout insulin spike caused by the dairy). I believe Robb Wolf still keeps it on the “acceptable” list for athletes provided they have found through elimination and similar means that it is a foodstuff that doesn’t cause them, personally, any digestive issues. For many, it does cause digestive issues and, in that case, I wouldn’t recommend that they use it – it’s a very personal decision. In comparison, the Primal community appear to be usually quite comfortable including fermented dairy (including yoghurt) in their diet.
If you search through my diet page you’ll find several articles which touch on the topic of dairy and whether it is paleo (and picking up on the subject of whether live culture yoghurt can be included in a paleo diet). Probably the most relevant is my post on “Is dairy paleo?” although the couple of posts on Paleo rules or framework (parts one and two) may also interest you.