The most luxurious yogurt in town is the one you make.
Jump to RecipeWe can really feel it now; the way that the light has shifted to gold, the crispness in the air, the way the heat seems to be escaping all around us. The cool nights, the bluebird sunny days, the long shadows as the sun sets over the ridge in front of the house. Fall is on the way.
These weeks around the equinox are auspicious in Ayurveda, a time when we pay particular attention to the slowing and cooling down – in our bodies, in the season. We practice shedding what no longer serves us, soothing the nervous system after a busy summer, and embracing foods, movements and rituals that help the body to eliminate excess heat. A little bit like when F1 drivers take cool-down laps, this is fall and the fall reset for those of us driving our own high-performance vehicles – our bodies! A busy summer, filled with activities, work, travel, excitement and the typical, indulgent gatherings with friends — this is our race. And the practices we embrace during a fall reset are the cooldown laps that help us cool our engines.
I’ll begin my own proper fall reset (or cleanse) in a couple of weeks, and I’ve been working on a few delicious recipes for both myself and my clients to use to help bring levity to what can be a rather austere diet. Unlike many other cleanse protocol you may have heard about, traditional Ayurvedic cleanses invite the opportunity to enjoy delicious, but very simple, highly digestible meals. Typically, a mono-diet of kitchari is recommended, but depending on our state of digestion, we can use other cooling, easy-to-digest foods to provide variety, color and a bit of excitement to this time of inward reflection. This homemade coconut yogurt with roasted spice plums is something I can’t wait to enjoy for breakfast during the week of the reset – a simple, sweet dish that feels luxurious. When is the last time that the words “cleanse” and “luxurious” were included in the same sentence?
Why not? Making your own yogurt is remarkably easy, and worthwhile. Most conventional yogurts use fillers, sweeteners, stabilizers, coloring agents and other non-food ingredients produce a product that can last in months in transit, and on the grocery store shelves. By making your own yogurt, you get to eliminate the use for all of these and instead get a clean, beautiful, creamy, delicious product that is literally singing with vibrancy – the way all of the foods we enjoy ought to be. It’s also worth mentioning that homemade yogurt will blow the socks off of anything that you can buy in the store with its supreme creaminess and taste, AND it’s less expensive than purchasing it from the store. So, you’re literally getting yogurt that tastes better, is better for your body and your wallet.
Absolutely! With some caveats. First, if your yogurt changes colors, or smells weird or looks weird, something has gone wrong and you need to toss your yogurt out. This can happen when your jar isn’t sterilized, or if there was some contamination in the fermentation process. It’s worth mentioning here that some amount of care needs to be taken in making your yogurt, but more care needs to be taken if you’re using dairy milk because the milk itself will have a propensity for bacteria already, and we’ll want to heat, then cool, and allow dairy yogurt to ferment. Here, I’m talking about making coconut yogurt with canned coconut milk that has already been heated and canned, so so long as we are sterilizing our jars, and taking appropriate precautions, we should have easy results, right there on the countertop.
There are only two necessary ingredients in homemade coconut yogurt; coconut milk, and live microbes that digest and ferment the coconut milk into yogurt, also called probiotics. I exclusively use Natren Yogurt Starter which is a product that MUST remain refrigerated. The strains of probiotics that Natren sells are some of the oldest in the world and this family-owned company from Yugoslavia has been propagating them for nearly 750 years. This product also contains a small amount of dairy milk powder so if you’re vegan, you’ll want to choose another brand. You can pick almost any probiotic pill that you like, but I recommend one that’s in a pill you can break open and sprinkle (instead of a tablet, which you would need to crush.) I also recommend a brand that is kept refrigerated which lets you know that as many of these little bacteria guys are ALIVE as possible.
Once you have your first batch of yogurt, you can save a bit and use it as your yogurt starter for another new batch. A little bit like a sourdough starter!
This is important – use the most simple, full-fat canned coconut milk you can find. Not coconut cream. Not coconut milk that’s been diluted for cereal in the cooler case. Unfortunately, not the cheapest brand you can find which will be clumpy and lumpy. Buy the good, whole fat stuff and be sure to read the label. Coconut should be the ONLY ingredient! No fillers, stabilizers etc needed!
If you’re recalling that Ayurveda recommends NEVER mixing fresh fruits with other foods (specifically dairy and yogurt,) then good on you – you’re my new favorite friend. It’s true that Ayurveda recommends enjoying fresh fruit alone since it digests faster than other foods in the gut, and therefore leads to digestive fermentation…which leads to other digestive complications such as gas, bloating and more.
However, fruits that have been previously cooked are a completely different situation. Because some of the natural sugars have already been broken down with the cooking process (such as here with the spiced plums) they digest more easily with other foods. Additionally, coconut IS a fruit! Despite having the word “nut” in its name, a coconut is a fruit — not a nut. In fact, a coconut falls under a subcategory known as drupes, which are defined as fruits that have an inner flesh and seed surrounded by a hard shell. This includes a variety of fruits, such as peaches, pears, walnuts, and almonds, too.
For this reason, combining cooked fruits with coconut yogurt and an almond-based granola is a sensible breakfast that doesn’t compromise our digestive health.
Is so easy, you’re going to laugh that it’s a recipe at all! Below I share two different methods to make it; one in an InstantPot to speed the process along, and the other on your countertop. I also share some complimentary recipes that I typically use to top my yogurt; roasted spice plums, a blackberry chia jam, and also a simple granola that’s on repeat in our house. Feel free to make all of the recipes, or to make one or two as a way of focusing your meals around the medicinal cooling this time of year.
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