» What is Frozen Yogurt?
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You love having it for dessert, but perhaps you wouldn't mind making it a part of your breakfast menu. Wrapped in temptation and topped with the nuttiest of flavors, yogurt has been on the menu of humankind for more than four millennia. Sometime down the ages, however, it took on the fancier and tastier form of frozen yogurt.
Made of yogurt, frozen yogurt is a low-fat frozen dessert that lies somewhere between ice cream and ice milk on the one side and conventional soft-serve on the other. Soft like the latter, yet distinct in flavor which veers more towards that of ice cream, this frozen dessert has a unique place on the world's dessert menu.
Actually, people in the Middle East and India have known about plain yogurt way before it entered the culinary palette of Americans, sometime around 1900. Today, frozen yogurt is a fashionable delicacy around the world, sold commercially as a health food item besides being a popular homemade goodie.
Without getting into the merits or demerits of which is better – the homemade variety or the commercial one churned out through assembly line productions – let's try and figure out what exactly frozen yogurt is. Is it a healthier version of ice cream? Or an icier soft-serve? Is it a dairy product or a fancy dessert?
What is Frozen Yogurt Made Of?
There are as many opinions as there are categories of lovers of frozen yogurts, and that's saying quite a bit. From the youth to professionals, from the young to the elderly, people across age-groups and regions love this scrumptious creamy concoction, which is a big business in many countries.
To begin with, let's find out what frozen yogurt is made of and how it really differs from other similar desserts, particularly ice cream. Frozen yogurt is made up of milk solids, some sort of sweetener, milk fat, yogurt culture, natural/artificial flavorings, and at times, even natural/artificial coloring. While most of these things are what go into the making of the ice cream, too, the difference lies in the proportion.
Here's a quick glance at how the various ingredients get together to make this yummy food.
Milk fat, which makes up about 0.55–6% of the yogurt, is what brings richness to it
Milk solids, at 8-14%, give it sweetness in the form of lactose and smoothness through proteins
Cane or beet sugar (15–17%) enhances the sweetness, increased solidity and improves texture
Animal gelatin and/or vegetable additives reduce crystallization to stabilize yogurt and increase the melting temperature
A smooth, rich, sweet and creamy frozen dessert with a consistency that remains unchanged in changing temperature. And it doesn't matter how you handle it. Carry it along while travelling, pack it into your child's tiffin, or go camping with it – the soft and creamy consistency of frozen yogurt remains unchanged, unlike an ice cream which begins to melt the moment it's out of the freezer.
Now what about the taste? It is as tasty as an ice cream? What does frozen yogurt really taste like? Is it all sweet, considering all those sweeteners and lactose it's made up of? Or is there anything different and distinctive about its taste?
The taste of frozen yogurt comes in as much variety as the flavors. So you may end up with an amazingly sweet kind, or with something that's a blend of the sweet and the tangy. If you're lucky and land up with the right kind, you may actually get the taste of a soft-serve ice cream, without the burdensome fat and calories that sometimes comes with it.
Clearly, then, frozen yogurt is not ice cream, nor a variation of it. Ice cream has more fat and more calories, though a little less of the sweeteners, which naturally leads one to the conclusion that frozen yogurt is healthier. Also, the yogurt culture, it's generally believed, makes it much more nutritious.
That probably explains why frozen yogurt has become such a fad across health-conscious nations like America, where in fact it's reported to have started in its current avatar. Pinkberry, which is now a chain of frozen yogurt outlets across many parts of the world, actually started in 2005 in America, which is now estimated to have a frozen yogurt market that's worth $200 million. Other countries like the UK are fast catching up, with the trend becoming increasingly popular among the British too.
Said to be a nutritionally balanced super-food, frozen yogurt is naturally fat-free and packed with probiotics, making it a great for improving digestion and strengthening the immune system of the body.
That does sound like a wonder food, doesn't it? Well, like all good things, frozen yogurt too has a flip side to it. Those yummy toppings that lend it the huge variety of exotic flavors are, in fact, believed to negate some of the amazing positive effects of this frozen dessert. The commercial sold varieties, in particular, are believed to be quite high in sugar, thanks to the sugar-packed toppings most of them come with.
Low calorie or not, fat-free or not, frozen yogurt seems here to stay, at least for the foreseeable future. With the trend of preferring frozen yogurt to other, less healthier dessert options, fast catching up, and considering the large number of varieties it comes in, there's something in it to suit every taste.
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