First let me start by saying hello again! Yes i know this is 2015 and my last post was 4 years ago. Get over it. A child, a cross-state move, a new job and mental distraction has gotten in my way. But, today I found new inspiration. I have been experimenting with homemade yogurt and I want to document my findings here for purpose of memory and to share what I have found with others on the same journey. So here goes...adventures in homemade yogurt (the soy kind).
I finally asked for a yogurt maker for Christmas this year. Now you would think with my family knowing that I have a dairy allergy that someone would have had the sense enough to ask me why I would want to make yogurt at home. But, since we all know that family never really listens to each other, no one made any attempts to keep me from trying to make something that is harmful to my body.
So, on Christmas day I unwrapped my new yogurt making machine in front of my entire family. It came with some carefully selected yogurt starters. All I needed was milk to get me started on my way to yogurt happiness that I would diligently eat everyday as my afternoon snack.
What everyone, or no one, realized or cared was that my intentions with this yogurt maker were not to do bodily harm, but to actually take more control over the goodness that I had already been putting into my mouth on my own.
I have loved yogurt ever since I was a young child. My mom and I would go grocery shopping in the summer and one day as we stood in front of the dairy isle I asked her what this stuff in a cup with fruit on it was. She told me it was yogurt and explained to me that is was like cottage cheese only no lumps. I said I wanted to try it so she bought one. And Dannon history is made. It tasted like candy and I ate that stuff everyday for the next 20 some years.
Spring forward to sometime early-90's. I'm in desperate shape to find out what the heck is wrong with my stomach and these stomach pains that can debilitate me sometimes. My husband knows what I'm talking about. Despite our second date consisting of a dinner cut short and a ride to his place with the passenger seat horizontal and me laying in it in deep pain, he still married me anyway!
Before I even met Shane, I made and appointment with the Carl Phieffer Treatment center in Wheaton, Ill to try and find out what was going on. I won't go too much into this part of my life, but I must have been desperate to drive almost 2 hours several times over the course of a few weeks to be poked with needles and have a quarter of my hair cut off for testing to find out what minerals and such I was lacking in order to set up a crazy vitamin regime to follow in hopes to correct what ever imbalance was happening inside my body. Well this helped for some other issues, but the stomach pains were still there. It wasn't until the mid-90's that I found Whole Health Chicago where I would meet a Dr. that would finally understand my plight and do the right thing and have my blood tested for food allergies. Geez, my surprise when the tests came back that I was "Severely" allergic to the protein in cow's mild. Hooray! I now know what might be causing my stomach pains. Boo, I have to give up my yummy cheese, ice-cream and beloved yogurt. oh no.
Let's just say that back in the 90's soy was not super common. Most people who ate soy were hippies from decades past, or the very underground new-ager, naturalistic spiritual types. I new many. Dabbled a bit. Found out I wasn't really one. So when I had to give up dairy, finding a substitute wasn't really an option. I just had to give up and move on.
A few years went by when finally I made my way up to a co-op grocery store call People's Market up in Evanston. I'd heard about it, but living in Chicago, even with a car, you just didn't really go much further than your neighborhood when doing errands like shopping for food. This is where I found soy yogurt. I knew about it before that, but I had only tried some limited brands and all of them were grainy and tasted awful. The first brand I tried was Stoney Farms. It was actually not bad, and over time, the brand has cultivated it to taste even better. I can't remember some of the other brands, but most of them just didn't really have the consistency or taste of real yogurt. And, they didn't really offer anything new to my tastebuds to keep me interested in adding them into my diet.
Over the years I stuck with Stoney Fields mostly because of availability. What I really had overlooked, purely because of denial, was the fact that this yogurt was made with a milk protein and milk based cultures. So, in the end, I wasn't really avoiding dairy after all.
These proteins and cultures, I was led to believe, were the reason the soy yogurt was able to emulate real yogurt so well. I believed this and continued on with my denial. For years this went on. Unable to give up dairy completely was making me live in a state of denial that I was still living a dairy free life. My stomach got better, but I still had attacks.
After we moved from Chicago in 2009 to Kansas, I continued to shop at Whole foods. At this new location, I found a yogurt I was unfamiliar with called WholeSoy, Co.. I was impressed immediately with the taste and texture. And, this was the first completely dairy free yogurt that tasted great! That was it. I finally found a soy yogurt I could be dairy free with! Only took me 15 years. How time does change things.
I continued to eat WholeSoy up until Christmas 2014. I really do recommend it if you are looking for a dairy free yogurt. It's the only one out there that has successfully, in my opinion, replicated cow's milk yogurt, while also making soy yogurt it's own category worth switching to if you are just looking for s new flavor and want to avoid dairy for whatever reason you have.
Now that I was on the road to new yummy soy yogurt happiness, a new danger reared it's ugly head. It was called sugar. The 21st century scourge. I had my yogurt, but I never though about how much sugar it contained. This is where the second part of the story starts. My dive into homemade yogurt was as much about decreasing sugar as it was about taste. And so it goes. There is always something to remove from my diet to achieve health perfection.
2/3/15
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