When I was grocery shopping last week, I really wanted to buy a pail of ice cream for my family. This is hard. When I can't afford the treats for my family that I know they'd enjoy, I feel terrible. Anyway, with my senior discount, the 3-qt. pail would have cost about $4. I actually had a pail in my shopping cart for a minute, then I thought of something I could make at home, with the ingredients that I was already purchasing. I put the pail of ice cream back in the store's freezer and finished my shopping.
Fast forward a couple of days. You may know that I make my own yogurt from whole milk and starter that I've saved from previous batches. I had just made another 3 and 1/2-quart batch of plain, whole milk yogurt. I took some of that yogurt, along with vanilla extract, and sugar, and I made one quart of frozen yogurt. (Savings -- no heavy cream to buy!)
To make this, I pre-froze the chilling chamber of my Donvier. The next day, I strained 1 quart of yogurt until about 1/3 of a cup of whey had strained off. In a large bowl, I blended sugar and vanilla with the yogurt until it tasted right to me. Homemade yogurt can be more tart than commercial, so this really is a YMMV thing and needs tasting to see when the flavor is right. I followed the regular instructions on my Donvier until the frozen yogurt was the right consistency, then scooping it into a freezer container to ripen (firm up) for a couple of hours.
Real frozen yogurt is not quite like ice cream. It doesn't have the butter fat that ice cream does. And its tanginess comes through in the flavor. However, it's delicious in its own right.
I'm old enough to remember the first frozen yogurt shops in the US, back in the mid to late-1970s. There were usually 2 flavors from which to choose, and the toppings bar consisted of granola, trail mix, plus dried and fresh fruit. The frozen yogurt definitely tasted like frozen yogurt, and could not be confused with ice cream. But those of us wearing Earth shoes liked that this tasted healthier. We (or our parents) were already granola-eaters and sprouts-growers. A tart frozen treat was just about right for the times. Today, frozen yogurt shops boast 15 or more varieties, have toppings bars with candy and cookie pieces, and the flavor is much more like an ice cream shop than a health food stop. The usual set-up is serve-yourself. If one is not careful, a single dish of their sweet treat can costs a small fortune, ranging from $6 to $10 (or more as we've accidentally discovered).
My homemade frozen yogurt cost me about 90 cents a quart. I've made my own granola and strawberry syrup (from last summer's frozen strawberries) to top our dishes of frozen yogurt. I'd estimate a single sundae of homemade, from scratch fro-yo with equally from-scratch toppings is somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 to 40 cents.
This was indeed a pretty good substitute for my ice cream dilemma. I suspect that I will be making frozen yogurt a lot this summer.
A Donvier is a hand-crank, no-rock-salt-needed ice cream maker, popular in the 1980s and 1990s. I got mine as a wedding gift and have used it every summer since.
