Who Needs Oikos?

Guess what else is greek?

My Yogurt!

So all over the blogosphere we’ve got Oikos flaunting around like friggin Angelina Jolie while all us Canadians as usual are left with nadda, nothin! No Oikos here. :-P Or at least not in Nova Scotia. In fact I’ve been hard pressed to find any kind of “greek” yogurt here, apart from “Mediterranean” varieties of some brands like Liberte, which I am NOT knocking by the way because that stuff is yogurt crack heaven in my books and you all know that! What I’m talking about is thick organic non-fat plain yogurt.

But I thought I’d make my own greek yogurt because I had about 3 extra tubs of plain yogurt leftover from our little soirée that I didn’t end up using, so I thought it was the perfect time to get to making my own! Easy peasy. I’ve got President’s Choice Blue Menu Finesse yogurt here and not organic, but you get the idea…

Just strain it to remove some of the extra moisture (whey) and you’re left with a thicker creamier yogurt.

I thought I’d do a little experiment to see exactly how much moisture I was going to actually remove from the yogurt. I started off with:

And then I lined a mesh strainer with about 3 coffee filters:

Covered it with some plastic wrap and let it sit in the fridge:

(ok i didn’t cover it in the pic, but that’s what I did!)

I ended up letting it sit for about 3 days in the fridge, only because I never seemed to have enough time this week to get to it, but I’m sure you wouldn’t have to leave it that long.

The finished product (quite shrunken from a full container):

And this time it weighed almost 200g less!:

This amount of whey dripped out:

It’s very creamy and much thicker:

Use it as you would regular yogurt and it’s worth the wait! I’ve been thawing some of the frozen berries I got while at Farm Girl’s farm and mixing it up and I’m getting used to plain yogurt so much now that when I do get vanilla, it seems like a huge treat!