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Sunday, September 20, 2015

* FOOD BOOK OF THE MONTH! : Yogurt Culture (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

YOGURT CULTURE (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015, 352 pages, ISBN 978-0-544-25232-5, $22 US hard covers) is by Cheryl Sternman Rule, author of Ripe and the award-winning culinary blog 5 Second Rule. She's also a free-lance food writer appearing in Cooking Light, Eating Well, Vegetarian Times, and more. You also cannot beat the log rollers of Mollie Katzen, Deborah Madison, Anne Mendelson, and others. Yogurt has been around North America for about a century, but lately, with the advent of Greek-style Yogurt (which is simply drained yogurt and thus sweet and creamy when most of the whey has been eliminated), sales have climbed. Most of the yogurt now sold is Greek-style (sweet and creamy). This is a basic cookbook, subdivided by topics such as Flavor, Dress or spread, Sip, Slurp, Dine, Bake, Chill, and Lick. Within each is material on different kinds of global yogurts from Afghanistan, Mongolia, India, Serbia, Turkey, Israel and more. There is a primer on how to buy yogurts, visit yogurt producers, read labels, and even make your own (and yogurt cheese such as labneh). Preparations have their ingredients listed in avoirdupois measurements, but there is no table of metric equivalents. She concludes with a selective bibliography, a resources lists, some end notes, and three full pages of acknowledgments.
Audience and level of use: yogurt users.
Some interesting or unusual recipes/facts: strawberry-rhubarb compote; fennel-pear-carrot slaw; savory lassi; cauliflower bacon soup; little cheddar-chive-cornmeal pancakes; shahi korma (creamy beef curry).
The downside to this book: it has been awhile since the last yogurt cookbook, but do we indeed need another one?
The upside to this book: she has a FAQ troubleshooting section.
Quality/Price Rating: 89.
 
Chimo! www.deantudor.com

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