I don’t think I ever saw or tasted yogurt until my summer backpacking in Europe, when I stopped in for an inexpensive lunch at a French university. It was a backpacking ‘hack,’ as they didn’t check IDs and the food was subsidized.

After lunch, just about all of the students had tiny cups of Danone with fruit at the bottom.

Interestingly, Danone was among the very first commercial yogurts, first produced in Barcelona in 1919 and named after the owner’s son “little Daniel.”

In the New World, it was first popularized at the Kellogg Sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan, home of the cereal, too and was used orally and believe it or not for enemas, a popular treatment at the time.

At the time it was mostly associated with Russian and Middle Eastern cultures. 

Colombo Yogurt, a shortened version of an Armenian name, was originally delivered around New England in a horse-drawn wagon and as the basic product was too sour for North American palates, fruit was added at the bottom, a new style of yogurt, which is how I first remember it. Soon its health benefits were advanced. Now as it’s part of the fermented product trend, like pickles or sauerkraut, and as it contains live cultures, yogurt is often associated with probiotics, having positive effects on immune, cardiovascular, and metabolic health. I try to have some every day, along with some nuts. 

It’s actually easy to make very good home-made yogurt. 

We make ours in an Instapot. It’s so easy – and it tastes beautifully farm-fresh. It’s much better than even the best store-bought varieties, which contain stabilizes, gelatin and lots of sugar. Maybe it’s psychological, the pride in home-made, natural products.

All you do is sterilize the Instapot canister with boiled water, dump it out, and pour in two litres of whole milk. In the pot’s yogurt setting, move it to boil and seal the lid. In about a half hour, it’s 100C, and you take the liner out and cool it too 48C/120F or so. Scoop out some full-fat yogurt into a bowl, and ‘temper’ the warm milk in the bowl, whisk it together, and pour it back into the container. Turn it too low and dial in a time. With experimentation, I’ve concluded that 12 hours is best, produces a thick, tangy tart, plain yogurt. It’s difficult to find full-fat yogurt; in these diet conscious times, most are 0%. The other day, having decided to make more yogurt, I discovered our latest batch had been finished off, so there was no starter. (A previous batch is necessary to pass on the live cultures).

I was amazed to find 11% Oikos the only full fat yogurt available. In fact, I’d never seen such a high -fat product. I wanted to make the yogurt, so I bought it, despite my reservations. And it made very good yogurt, such an infinitesimal amount of butterfat, it made no difference. I don’t think the 11% takes over the 3.5% whole milk; in any case, it tasted very tangy as we like it. Often, we then ‘Greek’ the yogurt, let it sit on cheesecloth for a few hours, as the whey seeps out, with its many spin off benefits, it comes out very thick. 

In most frozen yogurt recipes, Greek yogurt is called for but there was an abundance of the 11% and that gave me an inspiration: make a frozen yogurt gelato with the leftover and leave out any heavy cream. At the same time, strawberries were coming in very sweet and there were a few bananas. Put them all together and it made a great strawberry banana fro-yo. Delicious. And I get to tell you all about frozen yogurt gelato.

As the sun makes more of an appearance, and we think of spring and more occasions for gelato, we heard from Gisella at Gelato North, one of my fave shops in the city. Near Yonge and Sheppard, it’s always worth a try for unusual flavours and well-made gelato. For the 

Lunar New Year, Gisella writes, “We made a limited quantity of Lychee Strawberry Sorbet. It has a lovely fresh lychee flavour and beautiful light pink colour from the fresh strawberries.”

Her classic tiramisu pistachio tiramisus are also wonderful, and use fair trade, bird friendly arabica beans from Birds and Beans in Etobicoke, which was one of my stops on the way or back  to teach at the Humber College Lakeshore Campus. Highly recommended. 

Hotel Gelato on Eglinton West reports special Valentine’s Day gelato flavours this month including blood orange sorbet, and white chocolate raspberry gelato. Little Portugal’s Death in Venice, is keeping up the creative gelato flavour creation with chocolate sake yuzu and coconut lemon cream pie.