Yogurt, One of My Top Five Ingredients

5 May

I am flat out in a panic if my fridge is without yogurt. Honestly, we get through masses each and every week. Along with olive oil, tinned tomatoes, numerous pulses and lemons, these are my go-to everyday ingredients that my cooking would fall short without. I buy a variety of yogurt, from standard own brand, Yeo Valley and Fage, to name a few. I always buy full fat, never low fat and I am fairly relaxed in my choice of Greek or Natural yogurt.

What I love most about yogurt is the easy versatility this ingredient brings to my kitchen. For breakfast, on muesli or granola, in overnight oats, whisked into pancake batters, thinned with extra milk to make soda bread instead of using buttermilk, extra thick and spooned into a bowl then topped with chopped fruit, seeds, nuts and honey, my breakfasts rely heavily on yogurt. Yogurt cakes are amongst some of my favourite cakes to bake, and I say that as someone who (shhh..) doesn’t especially like baking.

Whether used as an ingredient or simply as a condiment, I also love yogurt in savoury cooking. In almost every cookbook I have written I have given a recipe for a yogurt soup. I love the alchemy of stabilising the yogurt with an egg as you “cook” it in the soup, creating a rich and velvety soup. There are many family mealtimes where a bowl of seasoned yogurt is placed on the table for everyone to spoon over as they like. On rice dishes, curries, to top a hearty soup, to serve alongside grilled or BBQ’d vegetables, various meats and fish. Yogurt is also fantastic stirred or blitzed into so many different dips, yogurt is a brilliantly reliable ingredient. It’s also the reassuring spoonful when one dish or another might be slightly on the spicier side for any younger family members. In fact, I think offering yoghurt as a condiment to temper and tailor a dish to suit its audience, is the route to getting younger family members to be more adventurous in their eating habits. This has certainly been the case for my family.

As for these recipes, just 6 to start you off, I want to encourage you to use yogurt with the merry abandon with which I use it! The cake recipe is a winner, and so flexible, when you have mastered this recipe, by all means switch about with the spices and fruit used. Just this past weekend, I made the courgette and yogurt dip for my daughter who is stapled here at home revising for her A Levels. We ate this for lunch together in the garden, and as 45 minutes go, in what is a marathon of study, we had a lovely time together, albeit with the clock ticking and her head full of revision. 5 more weeks to go. The yogurt marinade used to cook the chicken is completely delicious, if you’re a fan of salty-sweet-spicy then this is the recipe for you! Yogurt flatbreads are amongst some of the easiest bread doughs to make, just stuff them with a mix of coconut, raisins and cinnamon and there’s no looking back for a breakfast to impress. We made these for breakfast with a couple of extra kids here on a sleepover over the bank holiday weekend, warm, pillowy flatbreads scented with cinnamon. The pile was swiftly demolished. There’s a cheaty version of manti that my two teens now make for themselves when faced with cooking a quick dinner on their own; so less of a recipe, more of a serving suggestion, but one you, and your teens, might also come to rely on. And finally, eggs baked with yogurt, tahini and spinach, because baked eggs are foolproof and totally delicious.

I am sharing these recipes at www.5oclockapron.com because I love sharing with this audience how I cook at home. And whilst I also have 10 published cookery books, I’d like for as many people as possible to have access to my recipes. There’s also my reels over on instagram where I post cookery videos which dovetail with all the recipes on my website and in my cookbooks.

I love cooking, and I love writing about food. @5oclockapron, in a nutshell!