YoChee, or yogurt cheese, is a concentrated form of yogurt used in cooking
and baking that you can make at home with the right yogurt and some very
simple steps. Eat Well The YoChee Way: Guide and 275 Recipes guides the
reader through making YoChee and gives a variety of ways you can use the
thickened, creamy substance to replace more fatty, creamy ingredients in
recipes such as spreads, breads, casseroles, pastas, desserts and breakfast
recipes.
I am a yogurt fanatic, just ask my college roommates. It was the joke in our
apartment that we could always count on one thing in the fridge (and
surprisingly for college students it wasn't beer) -- Dana's yogurt. So I was
excited to try making YoChee. Yogurt has numerous health properties
associated with it, including live and active yogurt cultures that promote
healthy digestion and the body's yeast fighting powers, high amounts of
calcium and a vegetarian source of high-quality protein with much less fat
than found in other dairy products such as cheeses.
I was surprised to read that YoChee (in a variety of other names) has been
used in Middle Eastern cooking for generations. This gave me confidence
that, if it's been made for generations, it must be easy enough to prepare.
But the instructions page seems a bit more complicated than the actual
process of making YoChee turned out to be. And a mention of the "specially
designed draining device" that the reader can buy from the YoChee.com
website made me wonder if I could make this at home without buying the
recommended equipment.
Turns out, making YoChee was quite simple. It's as easy as buying a yogurt
without any thickening agents, stabilizers, gelatin or gums in it (Dannon
Plain contains milk only and is relatively inexpensive), then setting a cone
wire coffee filter on top of a jar, filling it with Yogurt and allowing the
watery substance leak out of the yogurt for a number of hours (mine sat for
about six to eight hours). You can also use a colander and cheesecloth set
over a bowl, although I can imagine scraping the YoChee out of the
cheesecloth may be messy. The end results looks like a whole-milk sour cream
or a cream cheese.
I used the YoChee to make sweet biscuits, which were very good. The YoChee
took the place of a shortening or butter ingredient. With 7 grams of protein
per biscuit, 150 mg of calcium and less than one gram of saturated fat, this
recipe trumps any traditional biscuit recipe in health properties and tastes
just as flavorful and heartier than the average biscuit.
Other recipes I'd like to try with my next batch of YoChee include a Quick
Creamy Bean Stew, Eggplant and Potato Curry, Superior Spinach Dip, YoChee
Pesto and a frozen dessert snack "cube" called Cocoa Chunks that the book
says you can store in the freezer and "pop in your mouth when the mood
hits."
Almost any recipe that uses butter, cream cheese, sour cream or mayonnaise
appears to be able use YoChee as a healthy substitute to these high fat
ingredients. I recommend trying YoChee and reading this book to yogurt
lovers, dairy consuming vegetarians, people with lactose intolerance or
anyone who wants to lower their fat intake while increasing their intake of
calcium, protein and live active yogurt cultures.
The book says you can use cow, goat, sheep or soy yogurt. However, all the
recipes in the book were tested with only cow's milk. In my
own yogurt quest over the years, I've tried soy yogurt and not liked it
because it felt too "gummy" to me, but that could be because I tried a brand
with gums or thickeners in it, which is a no-no for making YoChee. Perhaps
there's a soy yogurt brand out there without any of those additives
in it, and then it would work fine.
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