Category Archives: Food and Cooking

Because food is interesting and recipes are good.

Making Your Own Flavored Yogurt (From Plain Yogurt) and Making Dalgona Coffee

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I remember when regular yogurt came in lots of flavors and brands. That was before Greek yogurt took over, along with the sugar-free, fat-free, everything-free yogurts. The rising interest in full-fat yogurts was a brief respite, but it seems to be passing in favor of various international style yogurts. Regular flavored yogurts make up only a small patch of the yogurt section, and I think this is even more the case for vegetarians, since Yoplait uses gelatin in their yogurts. (They used to, anyway–I haven’t checked recently.)

I have long been a fan of Dannon coffee yogurt, and apparently a lot of other people are, too. I can still find it in four-packs in some stores… sometimes. But I can’t find it reliably, and Dannon lemon yogurt has been gone for a long time. Fortunately, I can mix up a decent coffee yogurt and a very tasty lemon yogurt using plain yogurt and flavoring. As long as you don’t mind stirring your yogurt before eating it, you can get a variety of flavored yogurts from one large tub of plain yogurt. (Some people only like yogurt when it has that perfect jelly-like consistency straight out of the container–I can’t think of a good word to describe the texture–and so would not like home-flavored yogurt.)

For lemon yogurt, I have been using a large spoonful of lemon curd. Make sure it hasn’t been sitting in your fridge for months–I think the flavor deteriorates. Put the spoonful in a microwaveable bowl and nuke it for 5-7 seconds, just until it softens and stirs easily. Then add plain yogurt and mix.

For coffee yogurt, you can mix up some instant coffee and sugar with a little water, and keep it in the fridge for flavoring yogurt. For maximum entertainment value, make Dalgona Coffee. A friend told me about this, and it really is fun to make if you have an immersion blender with a whisk attachment.

Braun immersion blender with whisk attachment
Immersion blender with whisk attachment

Mix equal parts coffee powder, sugar, and water (hot water works fine.) Whisk until really stiff. It’s amazing!

Dalgona coffee, whipped, and the whipping container held upside down.
See how thick it is?

How do you use it? The on-line photos show it spooned onto milk, over ice, for iced coffee. It looks nice, but I just end up stirring it in, and it doesn’t taste any different.

Dalgona coffee also makes a nice cafe au lait when stirred into hot milk. And (more to the point) you can also add it to yogurt, though I suggest adding extra sugar. I haven’t tried whipping the coffee mix with extra sugar, but that would cut out a step if it whips successfully.

A bowl of plain yogurt with a blob of Dalgona whipped coffee on top
Dalgona coffee on yogurt–remember to stir!

Other flavorings: maple syrup (not maple-flavored pancake syrup, though I suppose that would be a flavor all its own), brown sugar (works well with yogurt), and what about jam? Presumably you could warm up strawberry jam just as easily as lemon curd and make fruit-flavored yogurt.

None of these ideas is particularly original, but sometimes it’s nice to be reminded that you have options.

Till next post.

Crumpets and Tea–trying out a treat I've only read about

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Buttered crumpets and tea. Crumpets always sounded appealing when they showed up in a novel, but for a long time I had no idea what a crumpet even looked like. I assumed it was a baked good (not exactly), and apparently good with butter (true), and I also vaguely assumed it was sweet.

Not so, apparently. When Cook’s Illustrated offered a crumpet recipe in their March/April 2020 issue, I decided I would have to try it. A few weeks ago, I did.

As I mixed the batter, I realized there was no sugar in the recipe. Well, there’s no sugar in a lot of French bread recipes either, but French bread works beautifully with butter and jam, as well as with savory toppings. So I just figured I would have to put jam on them.

Watching the crumpets cook was interesting. They got bubbles all over, which was almost disturbing, and the recipe advised touching the surface with a spatula to turn the bubbles into little holes, then flip the crumpet to cook the other side. The result, then, is something like a pancake absolutely full of little holes.

Crumpets have holes on top and a smooth side below
 

These many little holes are good at trapping the butter that melts on a hot crumpet, and that helps me understand one of the descriptions of buttered crumpets found in House of Many Ways, an excellent book by Diana Wynne Jones.

To set the scene–Charmain is at the palace, where she is unexpectedly invited to tea with the king and some newly arrived visitors.

     Charmain thanked the gentleman again and took two. They were the most buttery crumpets she had ever encountered. Waif’s nose swiveled to dab gently against Charmain’s hand. “All right, all right,” Charmain muttered, trying to break off a piece without dripping butter on the sofa. Butter ran down her fingers and threatened to trickle up her sleeves. She was trying to get rid of it on her handkerchief, when the lady-in-waiting finished saying all anyone could possibly say about the weather, and turned to Mrs. Pendragon. (p. 178)

 Charmain isn’t the only one having a problem. The lady-in-waiting asks about Mrs. Pendragon’s little boy.

    “Yes, Morgan,” Mrs. Pendragon said. She seemed to be having trouble with butter too and was mopping her fingers with her handkerchief and looking flustered.
    “How old will Morgan be now, Sophie?” Princess Hilda asked. “When I saw him he was just a baby.”
    “Oh, nearly two,” Mrs. Pendragon replied, catching a big golden drip of butter before it fell on her skirt. “I left him with–“

And now we’ll leave Charmain and Mrs. Pendragon to struggle with their hot buttered crumpets and other, as yet unmentioned, problems.

Back to my homemade crumpets. We toasted the crumpets (one was slightly underdone, one slightly overdone, one seemed about right) and buttered them.

Buttered homemade crumpet (with a bite missing)

So what did these particular buttered crumpets taste like? Slightly salty. And buttery. It made me think about the appeal of plain bagels grilled in salted butter. Not sweet, but wonderfully buttery and chewy and slightly salty. The texture was different, of course, but the comparison helped me understand why they would be appealing.

I should add that I don’t like my sweets to be particularly salty. When I have bread and butter and jam, I always use unsalted butter. Salted butter puts me off jam almost completely. So perhaps for other people, crumpets and jam is a better combination than it is for me.

All in all, I’m not sure I’ll bother to make them again. It was fun, but there are so many other exciting things to make that I like better. I’m glad I tried it, though.

Till next post.

Athelas, Lembas, and Butterbeer–impossible delights in fiction

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For February’s project, I’m working on a second draft of the cozy mystery I wrote in November for NaNoWriMo, currently titled Warnings at the Waterfront. In this story, I describe an award-winning lemon éclair as being
“a pastry oblong about five inches long, glazed with a streak of chocolate and dotted with yellow icing flowers… She took a bite and gooey lemony custard squeezed out the sides. It was sharp, sweet, and creamy all at once…”
Yum!
But could a lemon éclair be that good? It’s one thing to describe an item so that it sounds appealing to our sense of taste, smell, or sight. It’s quite another for such an item to exist, or even be possible. Lemon and chocolate is a tricky combination, and I’ve been experimenting with combinations of lemon curd and vanilla custard in an attempt to come up with an actual lemon éclair. So far, it falls significantly short of its fictional version.
Homemade lemon eclair with chocolate glaze
An attempt at a lemon eclair
There are plenty of wonderful things in books; things that I would like to exist, but which don’t. When I first read The Lord of the Rings, I was much impressed with athelas, aka kingsfoil, and its fragrance when crushed in the king’s hands and cast into water. Its fragrance is described as follows:
“and then he crushed them, and straightaway a living freshness filled the room, as if the air itself awoke and tingled, sparkling with joy. And then he cast the leaves into the bowls of steaming water that were brought to him, and at once all hearts were lightened. For the fragrance that came to each was like a memory of dewy mornings of unshadowed sun in some land of which the fair world in Spring is itself but a fleeting memory.”  (The Return of the King, p.173)
Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have an herb so deliciously fragrant that it could banish the Black Breath? Or, in our world, depression?
What would such an herb smell like? In my mind, athelas was a sort of combination of parsley (crisp and fresh) and peppermint (cool and sharp), without being either. I guess peppermint comes closest, at least for me, but I’d still like an athelas plant of my own.
There were plenty of other non-existent entities to long for in The Lord of the Rings. Lembas, the elves’ waybread, are described as  “very thin cakes, made of a meal that was baked a light brown on the outside, and inside was the colour of cream.” Not only do lembas taste better than the best of honeycakes, but
“the cakes will keep sweet for many, many days, if they are unbroken and left in their leaf-wrappings, as we have brought them. One will keep a traveller on his feet for a day of long labour, even if he be one of the tall Men of Minas Tirith.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, pp. 478-479)
 Maybe someone could come up with something that resembles lembas in flavor and texture, but they are unlikely to duplicate its nourishing qualities and long shelf-life.
A more modern example of a fictional delight is butterbeer. A mug of hot butterbeer on a cold day sounds like a great treat, but how would it actually taste? The name itself calls up the taste of butterscotch and root beer. I haven’t had the butterbeer that was created for Harry Potter fans, but I gather that butterscotch is one of the flavors involved. I suspect that if their version had turned out to be as good as the fictional version, it would be more widely available by now. And while I like butterscotch, it seems like a very strong, very sweet flavor for something you’re going to drink an entire mugful of. (Then again, perhaps I would have said the same of root beer, if I’d only ever had it in the form of candy.)
But back to my fictional lemon éclair. It just may not be a genuine possibility. One solution is to change the pastry in the book to something that could be genuinely wonderful (and so be able to include a recipe for it, should the book ever get that far.) That’s probably the best solution.
But that isn’t always the solution. Some books, especially fantasy, are better with a few impossibly wonderful things in them. We just have to accept that description outpaces possibility. Not every longing we have can be satisfied.
At least I’ve got peppermint.
Till next post.
P.S. Page numbers are from the 1965 paperback edition of The Lord of the Rings.