Greek yogurt is one of the top “clean foods“ out there. Healthy eaters love greek yogurt as it is high in protein and low in calories. It’s also very creamy and tasty. Problem is, where I live we don’t have any. When I found out how easy it was to make I knew I needed to give it a try. Now you can too!
Here is how to make Greek Yogurt:
Step 1- Put a pasta strainer on top of a large bowl. On top of the strainer put a cloth to hold the yogurt. I use a clean baby spit up cloth. I know, sounds funny but it works! You can use some cheese cloth or any thin cloth.
Step 2- Pour all the yogurt into the strainer/cloth. Tie up the cloth so all the yogurt is in place and won’t spill out.
Step 3-Put the bowl into the fridge and let it sit for 10 hours.
After 10 hours the bowl will have liquid in it. This is the whey from the yogurt. (You can spill it out. Some people use it in smoothies etc, but I spill it out.) When you uncover the yogurt it will be thick and creamy.
Step 4- All you have to do now is put all the yogurt into a container.
I use 0% plain yogurt. I usually make this Saturday night and it is ready to eat on Sunday morning. Then I have a whole container for the week. It would probably be easier to buy one big container of plain yogurt and make it, but here I could only find individual plain yogurts so I use those.
What to do now with your greek yogurt? Well, you will have to wait for that recipe later this week!
i saw greek yogurt once in shefa shuk… it was 7% fat. but i thiught this way with the cheesecloth made yogurt-cheese?
Oh wow I never said it before. I think if you leave it in the cheese cloth for a longer time it can make it like cheese. I strain the white cheese and it turns into cream cheese. And thats for about 12 hours i think maybe longer, i dont remember.
* saw it
i strain sour cream, or sour cream and eshel. it had very little liquid leaking for some reason, i guess it goes into the cloth. we usually put it in half a day, but then my husband forgot to take it out of the cloth and it got really 'chunky', but still delicious!
It has that same or similar protein of the Greek yogurt sold in stores?
I believe so, but I can't be sure. You would need to do the math and see how much protein is in the yogurt you buy and then basically since the yogurt goes down to half the size each portion of greek yogurt has double the amount of protein as the same portion of regular yogurt.
We seem to find Greek yogurt wherever we go, so we are lucky. But it's really nice to know how to make it in the event that we can't find any, because we are hooked on it. Thank you for posting this.
I appreciate this — I keep hearing about Greek yogurt, but live outside the US (not in Israel, unfortunately,) and everything here has at least twice the fat content as elsewhere, and there IS no Greek yogurt. Your recipe made me immediately think "yogurt cheese." So I looked it up, and found that it has more protein and about half the carbs of regular yogurt – wow!
And it is basically yogurt cheese: Greek Yogurt: Strained yogurt, yogurt cheese, labneh, or Greek yogurt is yogurt which has been strained in a cloth or paper bag or filter to remove the whey, giving a consistency between that of yogurt and cheese, while preserving yogurt's distinctive sour taste. …
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_Yogurt
Now I just need to import some tasty, plain, 0% fat plain yogurt!
Thanks Rena! And great blog!!!
Is there a yogurty taste at all? I'm pretty anti-yogurt and would just as soon use cream cheese…would that work, do you think?
Yes, it is still yogurt so it does still have that slight sour yogurt taste. But if you use it in certain recipes like my pizza dough, you don't taste it at all. Also, I add honey or even peanut butter and cocoa powder to the greek yogurt and it has a mousse like consistency, BUT still yogurt taste…
how long does the greek yogurt stay good? i'm thinking of taking some to work, and adding blended strawberries and/or bananas…
In the fridge it is good till the expiration date that was on the yogurt you used. In terms on being out, I am not so sure sorry.