Yogurt Cheese

I found a new cookbook called Nourishing Traditions. It's premise of this book is interesting because it's a few years old but seems very "now" with recent evidence to suggest our obsession with cutting out fat from our diets and replacing that fat with carbs is actually worse for you than the fat was! One of the mainstays of cooking with this cookbook is that you add whey to a lot of recipes for added nutrition and to utilize the beneficial bacteria in some way (I will explain more what I mean about that in a future post or two). The first process is to get the whey. It seems the easiest way to do that is to make yogurt cheese.

Take a quart of plain yogurt and put in a clean kitchen towel in a strainer over a bowl. You can use nonfat or whole milk yogurt. One thing I have found is that you need to take a look at the ingredient list. I tried to make cheese once and it just wasn't straining - what I saw in the ingredient list was cornstarch - this made it so that the yogurt wouldn't strain - just a word of warning.

You let the yogurt sit at room temp for many hours - most of the day, if you can, until you have cheese. As you can see, that yellow liquid is they whey - keep that! Put the whey in a jar and place in the fridge for future use.

Here's the cheese.

I decided to mix my homemade ranch dip mix into the cheese.

Here's the finished product. I have found that with the addition of the salt from the dip mix, some additional whey will come out - you can pour that off. This stuff is better than cream cheese with a nice tang and can be used endlessly. Stay tuned for ways to use the whey!