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Just Pure Yogurt
By Anne Margaritis
"Special to The
National Herald"
 Few
foods can lay claim to such rich history and so many fanatical
devotees around the world as yogurt does. And few foods carry with
them so much lore as this creamy-white stuff which has found its way
under a variety of guises to the tables of hundreds of millions of
people. Over the centuries, yogurt has been revered as a love
potion, a builder of strong bones, an aid to digestion, even as a
treatment for skin-burns.
And, more to the
point, as an excellent health food. A recent study by the
University of California at Davis, concluded that yogurt reduces
your chance of catching a cold by 25 percent. It is also the number
one natural remedy for yeast infections, while the acetophylous it
contains helps digestion – a reason why many doctors recommend
yogurt for patients who have undergone stomach operations.
Strangely however,
this natural wonder was virtually unknown in America until the
mid-1940’s. And it was not until the 1980’s that its rise in
popularity began in earnest. Yet, even as mass-producers entered
the market, the yogurt they put out was not what yogurt-lovers from
the old-world would call, well, yogurt. It was more watery, less
creamy, more akin to light pudding rather than to the spread-like
cream enjoyed by hundreds of generations of Greeks, Turks, Arabs,
and Far-Easterners. Moreover, the taste of the usual supermarket
yogurt fare is still based less on the qualities of milk and more on
various extraneous tastes and additives.
This lack of good,
traditional Mediterranean yogurt did not go unnoticed by the
experienced eyes of Stavros and Fotini Kessissoglou. In 1986, the
newly-arrived immigrants from Greece, who had spent the better part
of their early years growing up in Istanbul, Turkey, bought a small
four year-old yogurt producer and formed Kesso Foods with the
express purpose of producing yogurt as it was meant to be – as their
experienced palates remembered it.
“We always had yogurt
on our family table, both in Turkey and in Greece,” says Stavros
Kessissoglou. “So when we formed Kesso, we set out of recreate the
quality and the taste that we were accustomed to. We were certain
there was a market for good, gourmet yogurt in America.”
“I still remember the
yogurt sellers in Turkey,” adds his wife, Fotini. “They would roam
the streets with two pans of fermenting yogurt balancing of both
ends of a wooden beam and, when you called them, they would come up
to your kitchen, cut a piece of yogurt, weigh it, and put it on a
dish provided by the housewife. The taste was glorious!”
The Kessissoglous not
only began producing traditional Greek (i.e. Middle-Eastern) yogurt,
they also experimented with their recipes.
“Just by varying
slightly the fermentation temperature we were able to take away some
of the yogurt’s sourness, and make it more acceptable to
unaccustomed American taste buds,” says Fotini Kessissoglou. “But
we will never use additives like color, gum to
alter the product’s natural taste” she adds stridently.
Kesso
yogurt has become a hit in New York’s gourmet circles. Nowadays you
can find it in some of the city’s best restaurants and also in some
of the tri-state New York area’s finest food markets. Perhaps not
surprisingly, however, most of Kesso’s afficionados live in
Manhattan, the world’s gourmet capital and the most demanding market
for fine foods on the planet. Many also live in traditional
immigrant neighborhoods – like Astoria and Brooklyn.
“What makes good
yogurt?” we asked Fotini Kessissoglou. “Yogurt must not only be
thick but it must also be smooth, creamy and consistent. Pure
yogurt is pleasantly sour and has a uniquely sharp wholesome taste,”
she answers.
It might sound
supercilious, but one can tell good yogurt just by tasting it, as
this writer found out after a brief test wearing an improvised
blindfold.
Half a pound of
Kesso’s pure Mediterranean yogurt – the strained variety – leaves
you feeling full as if you will not need any more food for hours and
hours, and y et keeps you feeling light without a trace of the
drowsiness that results even from a small lunch. This light feeling
is no accident, but a part of yogurt’s allure: You see, yogurt is
digested by the human body at a rate three times faster than that of
plain milk. Now, that’s light food.
Kesso
– which is located on 77-20 21st Avenue in East Elmhurst,
NY, on the outskirts of Astoria (tel. 1-718-777-5303) – makes two
varieties of yogurt.
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Regular strained
yogurt, which is thick like a spread – in Greek it is called
“sakkoula’s” (“from the bag”) – is what most of the rest of the
world simply calls “yogurt”. The Greek name comes from the
cheesecloth bags villagers use to hang the yogurt overnight in
order to drain most of its water and make it thicker. Kesso makes
this yogurt from pure cow’s milk without a trace of the butter fat
or the heavy cream found in mass-production regular yogurt.
“We use pure milk and the
resulting creaminess is due only to the way we process milk. We
bring out the milk’s natural creaminess,” says Fotini, whose
culinary expertise was featured last year in the New York Times
Magazine by the Times’ pre-eminent food expert Molly O’Neal. “Milk
is 70% water, so when you drain some of the water from the yogurt
the result is a thicker and richer-to-the-taste product.”
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For those
ultra-conscious of their weight, Kesso also makes 2% milk fat
yogurt, using 2% reduced fat milk. “This yogurt we do not
strain. We process it directly into the container that goes to
the market,” says Stavros Kessissoglou as he is preparing the
kettle for another round of production.
Kesso
also makes a famously thick tzatziki sauce – the traditional spread
that most modern Greeks have unfortunately come to associate mostly
with souvlaki. But be warned: Kesso’s tzatziki tastes nothing like
the liquid fare you usually get at most cut-rate eateries. It is
thick as cream cheese and progressively melts in the mouth adding
its “bouquet” in measured doses to the food it accompanies. By
contrast, commercial tzatziki as well as many yogurt-like products
in the market today are in reality made of sour cream, a
less-than-tasty or creamy way to cut costs.
Contrary to popular
perception, yogurt is not a lonely food, and can be consumed at all
hours of the day in various forms.
For breakfast, for
example, you can have yogurt with honey and your favorite cereal.
As a snack, you can
dip carrots, celery or cauliflower in yogurt mixed with a little
honey-mustard with some salt or pepper added. If you are dieting,
you can use Kesso’s 2% yogurt just as well.
For lunch, you might
want to add some tzatziki sauce to your grilled meat meze (tzatziki
is yogurt with cucumber, garlic, olive oil, vinegar, salt and
pepper).
As a dessert after
dinner, yogurt can be had with sour cherry delight (the traditional
Greek sweet vyssino) or with Fotini Kessissoglou’s special recipe
marketed by Kesso, which calls for yogurt with mixed dry fruits and
their natural syrup.
And, of course, at all
hours of the day you can have one of the tastiest concoctions ever
devised by man: Yogurt with pure honey and nuts.
Bon appetit! |
