orangette's lemon cake and frozen yogurt

I find orangette's blog extremely comforting. I have no idea if the real person Molly Wizenberg has a life that feels like the blog does, that has that urbane tone, or even if it's possible for a life to be like the blog that chronicles it. The blog brings into existence a world and a narrator who are about beauty, pleasure, leisure, and fulfillment. I guess correspondence to reality is beside the point. Narrative in general is comforting to me, even if some of the details are upsetting. Orangette definitely has that spark of narrative magic.

One great benefit of unemployment is that I've had ample time to read. It's great. I've torn through a couple books this week, and I love the drug of getting swept up in narrative. Also, I've been making use of the public library, so the pleasure is guilt free. No books accumulating around the house; no shameful amazon packages arriving. I read Amanda Hesser's Cooking for Mr. Latte and All the Way Home: Building a Family in a Falling-Down House by David Giffels. Both are enjoyable reads. Giffels is quirky and brilliant and a terrific writer. Hesser's a well-known food journalist and the book has recipes, none of which I've tried yet, but they look good.

I've been dipping into Orangette's recipes, as I read her archived posts. I recently made her French-Style Yogurt Cake with Lemon. Actually, I made it twice, once using eggs, another time eggless (replacing eggs with extra yogurt and some Ener-G Egg Substitute, if I remember correctly). The eggless version tasted good; the texture was crumblier than the egged version. It's a simple cake, not flashy. I love the fresh lemonyness of it, clean and elegant. I did jazz it up with a side of frozen yogurt, which is the easiest possible frozen dessert and delicious.

Vanilla Frozen Yogurt

4 cups Brown Cow Cream Top Plain yogurt
1/4 cup agave syrup (you might want to start with less and add more to taste)
1 t. vanilla extract

Whisk the yogurt with agave syrup and vanilla extract. Taste and add more syrup if necessary. Freeze in ice-cream maker according to basic instructions. I use agave syrup here because it mixes directly into the yogurt and has a nice clean taste. Honey or maple syrup would be tasty too, but would contribute more flavor to your final blend. Or you could use presweetened vanilla yogurt. I haven't found a yogurt that I like as well as Brown Cow.

Yogurt Bear

6 oz yougurt	250
Yougurt Bear	400
taco + on. ring	400
grapes	100
pizza	350
	1500

I found this list written inside the cover of a book* I've had since high school. As a late-80s teen, I was an inveterate dieter and liked to keep logs of my caloric intake. I hope that after consuming the pizza @ 350 calories I went on to eat a vegetable or two, but probably not.

Even then, I had a thing for yogurt (even if I couldn't spell it). I'm not sure what a Yogurt Bear is, but my best guess is a frozen yogurt franchise, like TCBY (The Country's Best Yogurt) or ICBIY (I Can't Believe It's Yogurt). My high-school years coincided with frozen yogurt's heyday. The landscape of suburban Des Moines, Iowa, was dotted with frozen yogurt shops, along with Mrs. Fields' Cookies and bagel stores. Then, of course, those went away and were replaced by Starbucks and . . . what else? Taco Bell? Panera? Cold Stone Creamery? The next time I'm in Des Moines I'll have to make a survey. The "6 oz. yogurt" with which I started my day was probably a single-serving cup of yogurt, like Dannon, although 250 calories seems a little steep. Contemporary 6-oz. cups of yogurt run about 150 calories if I'm not mistaken. Maybe yogurt used to be richer.

At any rate, yogurt is one of my lifelong favorite foods. I don't eat very much dairy these days because it makes my allergies act up, among other reasons. I've tried commercial soy yogurt, and it just doesn't cut it. The brands at my disposal, Silk, Whole Soy, and Wildwood, are inadequate. Silk is watery and goopy, Whole Soy Plain is heavily sweetened and therefore unusable for savory applications, and Wildwood is the worst of all. I only found Wildwood recently and had high hopes, but it's chalky and acrid. All three of these brands have added starches and seaweeds and stuff, and while this may thicken them, I think the resulting texture and mouthfeel are objectionable. Also, they are expensive.

But there is a happy solution to this dilemma. Homemade soy yogurt is delicious, though time-consuming and temperamental.

I don't have a yogurt maker, but I do have a food dehydrator, a big plastic box with a fan and a heating element. It looks like it came straight from the 70s. It's by far the most esoteric piece of kitchen equipment I own. It's great for making yogurt, raising bread, and drying tomatoes.

Homemade Soy Yogurt

1. Mix 1/4 c. soy or dairy yogurt with about a quart of soy milk. Whisk to combine completely in a glass bowl with a lid.
   
2. Put lidded bowl in dehydrator set to 115 degrees. (If you don't have a dehydrator, this site has some ideas for alternate incubation methods.)
3. Leave for 5-8 hours.
4. When yogurt is set, remove from dehydrator. Refrigerate for a few hours. Then drain the yogurt to desired consistency. If it has set to a nice firm block, you may be able to tip off the extra whey. If it's broken up, then put the yogurt into a colander lined with a piece of cheesecloth. You can drain it just a little, or drain for a long time for a thicker yogurt.
   
5. Whisk yogurt until smooth.
   

Notes

• To state the obvious, for vegan soy yogurt, use soy yogurt as a starter rather than dairy yogurt. I've gotten my best results with a dairy yogurt starter, but soy yogurt works just fine. Try to pick a soy yogurt starter that you like the taste of. When I use Wildwood, I can taste the nasty additives in my new yogurt.
• I've used Brown Cow Cream Top and Fage as dairy yogurt starters. Both worked great.
  
• For best results, use freshly purchased yogurt as your starter. I've tried using homemade yogurt as a starter for future batches, but it hasn't worked well. Perhaps over generations, the balance of yogurt bacteria changes as the powerful ones push out the weaker ones.
  
• I get the best results from Westsoy Organic Original soy milk. I get good results from Silk soy milk and from Trader Joe's soy milk. I've gotten my worst results from Soy Dream soy milk.
  
• I don't sterilize all my equipment in boiling water, as some soy yogurt makers suggest. I do use clean equipment that's been washed in a dishwasher that has a "disinfect" cycle.
• I've only had one bad batch of yogurt ever. Instead of getting nice and custardy, the milk formed into a slimy, ropy structure. Like an idiot, I tasted it. Nothing bad happened to me, but since, I've realized I was probably growing a colony of "ropy bacteria." If this happens to you, throw it away.
• Occasionally the top surface of the yogurt after incubation will have a slight rosy discoloration. I've worried that this is some sort of bacterial contamination, but since it usually happens, I've concluded it's benign, and maybe just oxidation. After straining and whisking the yogurt, it never comes back.
• I tried making yogurt with homemade almond milk, and it utterly failed.
  

Soy yogurt made by the above method is not particularly cheap, especially if you use premium soy milk. To make this a truly economical undertaking, I'll have to use homemade soy milk.

*How I Got To Be Perfect by Jean Kerr. Jean Kerr is my favorite humor writer ever.