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Edited on Fri Apr-09-10 11:18 AM by jmowreader
I ate half the Neapolitan-style Greek Frozen Yogurt last night. As expected, it was delicious, satisfying, highly nutritious and just packed with active lactobacillus cultures.
It was also the approximate consistency of igneous rock.
To make this product better the next time, here's what I am going to do.
1. The first problem I had was starting out with one quart of yogurt. You lose half your volume in the Greek straining process and if you're going to do this you need to go large or go home, so the best bet would be to start with two or three GALLONS of yogurt. By the time it's strained down to half volume, there will still be enough to really do a nice job. (It goes without saying the only way you're going to get that much organic yogurt without having to rob a gas station first is to buy organic milk and a little thing of organic plain yogurt as a starter and make it yourself.)
2. The strawberries were way too coarsely chopped. You gotta have strawberry puree and a few sliced strawberries to make this work--a food processor is best, of course, but you could probably get away with a Slap Chop if you had one. Greek-strain the strawberries too, to keep the juices from thinning out the yogurt. And I think I used WAY too many. Plus, April strawberries have no flavor whatsoever.
3. To avoid the basaltic nature of the current product, I'm going to divide my yogurt into three equal portions and run each one through an ice cream freezer. Make a batch of strawberry frozen yogurt, pack it into a container, freeze it hard, then repeat two more times. Eventually you'll get there. The ideal tool for this is a blast chiller, but I don't have one. (There is a reason Neapolitan ice cream is not generally considered a DIY project.)
4. The chocolate was real gritty because of how it was prepared, as we all expected. I will melt the chocolate and mix it into the yogurt a little at a time. I KNOW you can make chocolate yogurt; it's one of the flavors Stonyfield offers in its Greek yogurt line. WIth ice cream you have some leeway because you cook the product to a custard consistency before freezing it. This is ALREADY that thick, so no cooking is necessary.)
5. No one says Neapolitan ice cream HAS to contain vanilla, strawberry and chocolate stripes, right? There's not a law or anything..."put almonds and walnuts in the middle stripe or make the fruit-flavored stripe out of blueberries and we'll send you to Gitmo"...so why NOT make the middle one almond-rum flavored? It would be good!
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