Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Adventures in Cooking -- Whey into Yogurt

I know I just started making yogurt recently, but I am whey into it!!! I think I'm addicted. See, I have a sweet tooth. So I keep reaching for it. I love it with honey in it and blueberries if I have any. I also love it as a parfait. . . Throw some strawberry slices and some granola in there and yum! Sadly enough, I find myself reaching for the honey buns to keep myself out of the yogurt. I'm making 2 batches of yogurt a week, which for me makes 4 cups of eatable yogurt and 2 cups of the starter. I'm going to experiment with using 1 cup of yogurt as the starter though and see if it comes out as thick as I like it. . . That would rock because that would give me 2 more cups of yogurt a week to eat. The only problem I'm having with the yogurt is the whey. I like my yogurt thick (think greek yogurt/ sour cream consistency) so I strain it with a strainer lined with a thin dish cloth and the liquid that comes out is whey. I have used it to make lacto-fermented salsa and pickles, in place of milk in muffins (which were great IMO) and to soak beans with, but that didn't use much whey and I have probably got 4 quarts of whey in my fridge now. I'm tempted to just throw it away as its taking up a lot of space, but I know its super nutritios -- full of water soluble proteins, lactose, vitamins and minerals from the milk and yogurt its strained out of. So I haven't been able to bring myself to throw it away yet. I'm constantly ISO ways to use it up. I've read that it can be used in the place of any liquid dairy called for in a recipe, but I'm leery. I tried it in a smoothie in place of yogurt and milk and that was kinda bleh. Even the kids left it alone. I threw in extra banana and they still wouldn't touch it. So tonight I'm researching stuff I can make to use the whey. Here's what I've come up with:

Making biscuits -- there's a great recipe on the Green Prophet blog for biscuits using whey that I plan on trying out very soon.

I saw a tip somewhere to use it in soup with half water, half whey and some veggies, but make sure the beans are cooked before adding whey as it prevents them from cooking fully for some reason.

Make lemonade with whey instead of water. (I have a bunch of lemons in the fridge begging me to try this.)

There are a lot of ideas here that I'd like to try including sour cream cupcakes and biscuits.

Pizza dough and bread recipes here.

Use in place of water to cook rice and pasta.

I can see I'll be doing a lot more cooking to use up this whey. I can also see that I'll be buying Nurturing Traditions as soon as I have enough Amazon cards racked up from Swagbucks and Winster. I think next on my list to buy will be either a yogurt starter that can be made on the counter top or a yogurt maker. Either way, its official -- I'm whey into yogurt ;)

No comments:

Post a Comment