Top Yogurts of 2007

Faithful yogurt-lovers, I know that the posts have been a bit thin on the ground for this blog over the past few months. I'm definitely planning to make 2008 a more yogurty year, with more regular reviews of new products. So to kick things off, I thought that I would post a list of my five favorite yogurts of 2007.

I ate a lot of yogurt last year…some excellent, some not so great, but these five really were a cut above the rest. Don't put too much faith in the order, which is somewhat arbitrary—I'll really take any of these pretty much anytime, and hope you'll give them a try, too. So without further ado:

The YogBlog's Top 5 Yogurts of 2007

1) Ronnybrook Drinkable Yogurt, peach and blackberry flavors (YogBlog score: 15/20)

2) Old Chatham Sheephearding Company Sheep's Milk Yogurt, maple and ginger flavors (YogBlog scores: 14/20 and 15/20)

3) Traders Point Creamery Organic Grassfed Yogurt, wildberry and orchard trio flavors (review forthcoming!)

4) Trader Joe's Matcha Green Tea Lowfat Yogurt (YogBlog score: 14/20)

5) Fage Total 2% Greek Yogurt with honey (review forthcoming!)

I chose these top yogurts on taste alone, but you may notice that they have some other key similarities. Short list of ingredients. Much lower in added sugar than typical commercial yogurts. Contain some fat instead of a bunch of added thickeners. The top three are produced by single herds on small farms. The top two are produced within 150 miles of where I live. Coincidence that these generally earth- and health-friendly factors also produce the best-tasting products?

What were your favorite products last year? What yogurts should I check out in 2008?

In Brief: Yogurt Notes

I know I said that this blog is on hiatus...but I've actually sampled a lot of new yogurts lately, and while I don't have time to do full reviews, I thought it might be nice just to share a few impressions! If you've tried any of these, I'd love to hear what you thought of them.

So, without further ado...the mini-reviews:

Trader Joe’s Coffeehaus Mocha Lowfat Yogurt: Disappointing - but then again, I'm not much of a chocolate yogurt person, and my cup was past the expiration date.

Traders Point Creamery Drinkable Yogurt - Raspberry: I'm a sucker for drinkable yogurt, and this stuff from Indiana is 100% organic AND grass-fed, but sadly I found the texture of the full-fat yogurt off-puttingly thick. If you dig thick yogurt, though, you may really like it. (I'm also curious to try their low-fat version, which could be less viscous?)

Redwood Hill Farm Goat Yogurt - Blueberry and Apricot-Mango: The nutrition facts are all in the right place in this certified humane goat yogurt from California, and the flavor of the blueberry with a hint of a goat-cheese taste isn't bad at all. The Apricot-Mango is appreciably "goatier" which, I must say, put me off a little. And both could do with fewer added thickeners (gums, starches, etc.).

Liberté Goat Milk Yogurt - Raspberry: Also interesting-tasting, with a hint of goat cheese and a genuine raspberry flavor; also a bit long on the ingredients list. (I still want to try the honey flavor, though.)

DanActive - Various flavors: I know that Dannon is "the man" in yogurt circles, but I'm kind of a sucker for their teeny bottles of probiotic yogurt drink, which is not too thick and, surprisingly, genuinely yogurty-tasting. I've tried all the flavors now and have to say I like plain the best—the others (vanilla, strawberry, blueberry, cranberry-raspberry) are generally too sweet and have too many additives.

Emmi Swiss Premium Lowfat Yogurt - Cherry: Too much added sugar—and unlike with the Pink Grapefruit flavor, it tastes way too sweet. Disappointingly small cherry bits, too.

Trader Joe's Matcha Green Tea Yogurt

One-word verdict: Wowsa!

The backstory: This yogurt definitely caught me off-guard. I picked up a cup at Trader Joe’s last week on a whim when I was stocking up on Fage—noticed the cup in the fridge case, thought “I like green tea, that could be interesting,” glanced at the Nutrition Facts, approved, and popped it into the basket.
Now I wish I had bought twelve.

Nutrition: One of the (few) downsides of this yogurt is that—perhaps because it’s part of a TJ’s new snazzy-looking “Coffeehaus” line—it comes in slightly smaller-than-average sized cups: 5.3 ounces instead of your standard 6. So let the rejiggering of the Nutrition Facts begin…

Per 6 ounces of this yogurt, my calculations tell me, you will find 125 calories, 17 grams sugar, and 1.1 grams saturated fat. (Per actual 5.3-ounce serving, the numbers are 110 calories, 15 grams sugar, and 1 gram sat fat.) Even with it’s reduced size, the yogurt packs a decent amount of calcium (25% daily value in the 5.3-ounce cup). And it’s kosher and gluten-free.

Not bad.

Well, how is it? Dude, if you like green tea and you like yogurt, I’d say run, don’t walk, to your nearest Trader Joe’s and get some (because you never know if it’s going to be discontinued next week).

I opened it up and was greeted with a bright green (well, yellowish-green) color—almost exactly the same color that appears on the outside of the cup. The yogurt had separated a bit and there was a puddle of clear whey on top, but once I had mixed the yogurt a little bit the texture was silky-smooth and light.

I sniffed and got a mild whiff of green tea flavor but also, to my surprise, a real dose of actual yogurty scent. Was this yogurt actually going to taste like yogurt?

Yes, it was! In the smooth first bite, I definitely tasted the telltale mild yogurty tang that told me we were not in typical American yogurt territory. As for the green tea flavor, if you’ve ever had a Matcha Green Tea Blast from Jamba Juice or a Green Tea Frappuccino from Starbucks (both of which I’ll admit to having been a little bit obsessed with a few years back, at least until I found out how much sugar was in them), it’s like that, but less sweet. You probably taste the yogurtiness first, but then the green tea taste lingers after the yogurt has gone down. In fact, this may sound weird, but if you eat a few bites then close your mouth and breathe out your nose, you can taste the green tea flavor again on your tongue.

I devoured.

Where's it made? Again, not sure where the ingredients come from, but this stuff is “Distributed & Sold Exclusively” from Trader Joe’s Monrovia, CA, address, 2,759 miles from NYC.

Ingredient notes: I couldn’t believe how short the ingredients list was when I first picked up the cup. Grade A pasteurized skim milk, cream, nonfat milk, sugar, matcha green tea, and four bacterial cultures. No thickeners or stabilizers or or colors, no starches or gums or preservatives. Dairy, sugar, green tea, cultures—which is exactly what it tastes like when you eat it.

A slight quibble, though: What’s the difference between the skim milk and the nonfat milk? Is only the skim milk (but not the cream or nonfat milk) pasteurized? (I find that hard to believe.)

Processing/Earth-/Animal-friendliness: The container is your standard #5 plastic with a foil lid. And unfortunately, the cup makes no claims that any of the yogurt’s ingredients are organic, minimally processed, or anything but conventional.

Price: 99 cents per 5.3-ounce cup at Trader Joe’s…which translates to $1.12 per 6 ounces.

The bottom line: Brilliant taste, great European-style texture, and I love the spare ingredients list. I wish I knew more about the origins of the ingredients and that the cup wasn’t skimpy-sized, which is going to lose it a couple of points on price and sugar content. Still, highly recommended if you like green tea. (As an aside, I imagine they must have a companion “Coffeehaus” coffee flavor…which is another flavor I don’t do, so I’d love a report from the field!)

SCORING:

Trader Joe’s Coffeehaus Matcha Green Tea Lowfat Yogurt:
taste: 5; texture: 3; flavor novelty: 1; sugar: 1; sat fat: 1; price: 1; free of thickeners/preservatives: 2

TOTAL = 14

Link: Trader Joe's.

Emmi Swiss Pink Grapefruit

One-word verdict: Indestructible!

The backstory: Emmi Swiss Premium Lowfat Pink Grapefruit Yogurt is the professed favorite yogurt EVER not only of my good friend NYHH, but also of a fair number of Chowhounders out there. Now, I like me some grapefruit and I love me some yogurt, but—like many people I’m sure—I was a little skeptical about how well the twain would work together. The flavor would get a point for novelty, sure, but would it rack up points in any other areas?

I've known about this yogurt for a while, but I hadn’t tried for a few reasons: it's high in sugar, pretty pricey, and a bit hard to find (i.e., not stocked at Whole Foods). But all those tales of its uniqueness and deliciousness finally inspired me to seek it out, so when I recently spotted it at a somewhat reduced price, I picked up a cup.

Nutrition: When examining the Nutrition Facts panel, I found it hard to get past the whopping 24 grams of sugars—that’s at least three teaspoons of added sugar per bitty 6-ounce cup, blowing right past Stonyfield, practically into Dannon territory. The fat level's not bad (1.5 grams saturated fat), but all that sugar helps vault the calorie count up to 160 calories, which is higher than that of several full-fat yogurts. Not surprisingly, sugar is the second ingredient in the yogurt, after cultured reduced fat milk but before pink grapefruit, lemon juice concentrate, or grapefruit juice concentrate.

I understand that a little extra sweetener may be needed to counteract the tartness of the citrus components, but that much sugar added to a small cup of 'gurt really is too much for me.

Well, how is it? Well, I wish I could report that, with all that sugar, the yogurt was way too sweet…but it wasn’t.

It was actually very tasty. The flavor is a real wakeup call for the taste buds, managing to be citrusy, sweet, and yogurty all at once. It’s a novel experience, and highly enjoyable—after a few bites I got what the fuss is about. Damn those sugar-happy food chemists, they’d done an excellent job.

As for appearance and texture, the yogurt is a pleasant pink color (apparently aided by “red beet concentrate”) and contains distinct little pink grapefruit bits. Even better, the consistency is that great, silky European texture that’s not too thick but still hangs together nicely (well, probably with help from the “modified corn starch”).

Where's it made? Not totally clear (see below)—I contacted the company to ask, but they never got back to me. The address on the cup is in Valley Cottage, NY (39 miles from NYC), but I suspect that may just be corporate headquarters.

Ingredient notes: In addition to the cultured milk, sugar, fruit, and fruit juices I mentioned above, Emmi Pink Grapefruit Yogurt contains modified corn starch, red beet concentrate, natural flavors, whey protein concentrate, cultures (3 listed), and potassium sorbate (to maintain freshness).

In other words: genetically modified thickener, colorant, flavor enhancers, thickener…and preservative. Sure, red from beets beats FD&C red any day, and there's thankfully no HFCS to be seen, but still, the level of processing is disappointing, especially for a product whose “Premium” title, not to mention price, imply that it’s high-end.

Interestingly, according to this thread at Chowhound, it seems that this yogurt flavor may have recently been reformulated. Apparently it used to be less sweet, less “lemony,” and, according to the poster, better. (If any other longtime Emmi-eaters can pipe in with info on this subject, please do!)


I have been able to confirm that Emmi cups used to be slightly smaller than the standard yogurt cup, 5.3 ounces, and as you can see from the picture of the older version at the right, the design has changed. Also, the old cup used to say “Made from fresh Swiss Alpine Milk,” whereas the new cup says "Original Swiss Recipe" and "Produced for Emmi (USA), Inc." followed by a New York address. This at least implies that the company is now producing yogurt over here rather than importing from Switzerland. If that is the case and the yogurts are no longer being imported, then I think that their continued high price is completely unjustifiable.

Processing/Earth-/Animal-friendliness: The container is your standard #5 plastic, foil lid. (As an aside, I hung on to the empty cup after I finished the yogurt because I knew that Nutrition Facts for Emmi yogurt are not available online, and I wanted to have the evidence in hand for The Yogblog. Well, at one point the cup fell out of my pocket and rolled off into the street, where it was promptly run over by three different cars. I dashed back to get it when the light changed and found the cup to be in surprisingly good shape.)

The cup itself makes no claims about the origins of the milk or other ingredients, and the website offers frustratingly little information as well. In any case, none of the ingredients claim to be organic, "natural," or otherwise earth- or animal-friendly.

Price: This stuff sells for a whopping $1.99 per 6-ounce cup at Garden of Eden, which is the most convenient source to me, but I actually scored my cup at an Upper East Side branch of Dean & Deluca for $1.50. (Wow, what a deal! Note the sarcasm.)

For a product that appears to be using conventionally produced dairy, sugar, and fruit souped up with a bunch of additives (one of which is objectionable enough that Whole Foods won't carry it), that's pretty outrageous.

The bottom line: There are many reasons I should condemn this yogurt: its very good taste and texture should be overwhelmed in my mind by its high sugar content, not-so-good ingredients, and crazy price. It’s certainly not going to do well in my scoring system.

And yet…and yet…I don’t dislike it nearly as much as I should. It’s tasty, it’s interesting. Remembering how it pleasantly surprised me as I tried it for the first time, strolling through Central Park, makes me smile. There’s a lot of yogurt left out there to sample, but I’d like to eat it again sometime.

Apparently, not only the cup is indestructible—this damn yogurt is, too.

SCORING:

Emmi Swiss Premium Lowfat Yogurt—Pink Grapefruit With Other Natural Flavors:
taste: 4.5; texture: 3; flavor novelty: 1; sat fat: 1

TOTAL = 9.5

Link: Emmi USA.

Pear-off!

The backstory: I love pears, and I think that whoever decided to put them in yogurt is a freakin’ genius. I discovered Liberté Six Grains Pear Yogourt from Canada a couple of years ago at my local Garden of Eden and was highly impressed. Then, at some point, they either changed their formula or corrected their labeling, and the calorie and sugar counts went up a bit, and I laid off for a while.

I thought that Liberté was the only company producing a pear yogurt, but recently I spied some new flavors from Wallaby Australian Style Yogurt on the shelf at Whole Foods, including Organic Nonfat Bartlett Pear! Immediately I resolved to buy a cup of each and engage Liberté and Wallaby in a bloody, peary duel for my affections. Who wins? Read on to find out.

Nutrition: A six-ounce cup of Liberté has 160 calories, 2 grams saturated fat, and 20 grams sugar. Wallaby weighs in at six ounces with 140 calories, 0 grams sat fat (in fact, no fat at all), and 22 grams sugar. So Wallaby wins on fat and Liberté wins on sugar…if we use calories as a tie-breaker, the first round goes to Wallaby (albeit not by very much).

Well, how is it?

Texture: The Liberté yogurt has a lovely, light and silky, European-style consistency. If you tip it, it will spill (I tested this on my shirt). It also contains distinct chunks of pear and is dotted through with six varieties of chewy grain (which, honestly, I could take or leave, but they don’t bother me). The color is a bright white.

The Wallaby yogurt is also pretty white and fairly spillable, though the texture is visibly grainier. Most notably, though, no pear chunks—this yogurt’s pear qualifications come only from pear juice concentrate.

(Interestingly, Wallaby claims to have styled its yogurts after the “deliciously distinctive” yogurts of Australia, citing their “creamy texture” and “delicate flavor.” Now, I have eaten yogurt in Australia, and while it was fine, it also wasn’t very distinct from the light, creamy stuff you’ll find in Europe, or Latin America, or Canada, or pretty much anywhere that isn’t the U.S. So unless I’m much mistaken, “Australian style” is really “European style with a cute marsupial on the cup.” Hey, it got me to look twice…)

Round two to Liberté.

Taste: When I took the lid off the Liberté yogurt, a distinctive pear smell hit me immediately and whetted my appetite. The product did not disappoint: It manages to maintain the sweet-but-a-little-sour nature of a pear throughout the gently tangy yogurt. In short, it tasted like real pear in there, and the yogurt tasted like the fermented milk product it is.

I had to lean in to get a whiff of Wallaby’s pear scent, and even with my nose right over the cup it was mild. As for the taste, it was sweet first, followed by a hint of peariness…followed by more sweet. The yogurty tang was almost nonexistent.

Round three to Liberté.

Where’s it made? Liberté yogurt is made in Brossard, Quebec, Canada (368 miles from NYC); Wallaby is made in American County, CA (2,872 miles from NYC).

Processing/Earth-/Animal-friendliness: Both brands come in #5 plastic cups with foil lids.

Liberté is “Made with Vermont milk” (as they are all too happy to advertise on the containter, kind of like the Woodstock folks). The milk comes from the St. Albans Cooperative Creamery in Vermont, a collective of mostly small, family farms that does not allow the use of rbGH; however, it also doesn’t seem to have rules about antibiotics or feed, or guarantee its animals access to pasture. (St. Albans also supplies milk to Ben & Jerry's and to Stonyfield Farms for their nonorganic yogurts. You can learn more about them on Stonyfield’s Humane Animal Treatment Policy page here.)

Wallaby sources organic milk from Sonoma and Marin counties, which is by definition free of hormones and antibiotics and entails pasture access and organic feed for the cows. Wallaby has a rating of “four cows” (excellent) from the Cornucopia Dairy Survey, which measures elements such as pasture time and cow health and longevity.

Round four to Wallaby.

Ingredient notes: Liberté contains milk, pear base and grain preparation (natural apple extract, pears, water, barley, oat, rye, wheat, rice, buckwheat, native rice starch, natural flavour, pectin, citric acid), and four bacterial cultures. It gets points for being sweetened only with fruit, but points off for the multiple thickeners/stabilizers/flavorants.

Wallaby contains organic cultured pasteurized nonfat milk, organic evaporated cane juice, organic pear juice concentrate, natural flavor, pectin, locust bean gum. It also contains four bacterial cultures. Points off for having more sugar than fruit (which also, as I mentioned above, totally overpowers the yogurt’s flavor), though it has one less thickener/stabilizer/flavorant than Liberté.

This round’s a draw.

Price: Purchasing them at Whole Foods in NYC, the Liberté cost 99 cents and the Wallaby cost $1.09.

Round six to Liberté.

The bottom line: It looks like Liberté just edges out Wallaby, but if you’re going on taste and texture alone, it actually wins by a mile. I want to like Wallaby more than I do—their (organic) heart seems to be in the right place, they’ve just launched some interesting new flavors, and that marsupial on the yogurt cup is darned cute. But they’re going to have to up the fruit content and cut down on the sugar (I’d like to see a teaspoon less per cup) if they want my vote.

Until then, the Canadians have beaten the faux-Australians to a bloody, peary pulp.

Liberté Six Grains Pear, Stirred Yogourt, Pears and Grains
taste: 5; texture: 3; sugar: 1; sat fat: 1; price: 2; naturally sweetened: 1; animal friendliness: 0.5

TOTAL: 13.5/20

Wallaby Organic Bartlett Pear, Creamy Australian Style, Nonfat
taste: 3; texture: 2; sat fat: 2; price: 1; naturally sweetened: 1; animal friendliness: 1

TOTAL: 10/20

Links: Liberté Natural Foods.
Wallaby Yogurt.

Ronnybrook Drinkable Yogurt

One-word verdict: Divine.

The backstory: I love drinkable yogurt, but I eyed Ronnybrook’s colorful bottles at the Greenmarket, moseyed past them at the little shop at Chelsea Market, and spied them on the shelves of Whole Foods many times before I took the plunge. What kept me away? Maybe it was the brazen listing of “whole milk” as the first ingredient in the yogurt. Maybe it was the lack of Nutrition Facts printed on the label (how do they get away with that?). Plus, it cost $2.50 a bottle. I guess I assumed that, fatwise and pricewise, it was out of my league.

But I was wrong.

As I became interested eating more local foods, I found myself checking out the Ronnybrook website (the family dairy farm is located in upstate New York and serves the tristate area). There I found the Nutrition Facts for the drinkable yogurt line and learned that the stuff wasn’t nearly as dastardly as I thought. Then I discovered that, if you buy the yogurt directly from Ronnybrook either at their stall or at their shop, it only costs $2 for a 12-ounce bottle (that’s $1 per 6 ounces). I was sold—or, I should say, the yogurt was, to me: a bottle each of the blackberry, mango, and peach flavors.


Nutrition: Well, the bottles are 12 ounces and the info listed on the Ronnybrook site is for 8 ounces, but since 6 ounces is the standard size for a cup of yogurt these days, I rejiggered the Nutrition Facts (and price) so that I could compare the product ounce-for-ounce with other yogurts. It works out to about 135 calories, 3 grams saturated fat, and 19 grams sugar per 6 ounces for the mango and peach flavors (145 calories and 20 grams sugar for the blackberry). Not bad! A little high on the sugar side, perhaps, but I’m assuming that—for the blackberry and peach flavors, at least—a little of that must come from the chunks of fresh fruit floating appealingly in the bottle. And the featured fruit always comes before the (organic) sugar on the ingredients list, another plus.

Well, how is it? I have to admit that I could barely contain my enthusiasm after my first sip of the blackberry yogurt. I immediately sent my boyfriend an embarassingly ecstatic e-mail, laced with exclamation points and maybe a few expletives. What can I say? I felt like a hole in my yogurt-loving life had finally been filled.

The flavor was divine. Sweet, but not so sweet that the yogurty flavor was masked. The consistency was quite creamy, but interspersed with chewable chunks of blackberry pulp and seeds. And amazingly, even though the taste was so delicious, I found the stuff filling enough that I could actually stop drinking after 6 ounces and save the other half of the bottle for the next day. Well, maybe after 7 ounces.


To my delight, I found the peach flavor to be just as high-quality and subsequently crave-worthy as the blackberry. I was a tiny bit disappointed in the mango—perhaps because it’s blended smooth instead of having the little chunks. Or maybe I just set my expectations too high with the mango yogurt, a flavor I had never seen before (point for novelty!). In the end, I think that the peach and blackberry flavors were just a bit more perfectly carried off, but overall all of the flavors I tried tasted both fresh and decadent.

Where's it made? Ancramdale, NY (108 miles from NYC).

Ingredient notes: In addition to the (pasteurized) whole milk, fruit, and organic sugar that I mentioned earlier, these yogurts also consist of skim milk, pectin (a thickener derived from fruit), natural flavors, citric acid (natural preservative or flavorant), and eight “imported live cultures”—four of which are buttermilk cultures, which Ronnybrook claims “makes the difference” (dunno about that, but I think they’ve got a pretty good formula down, whatever they’re using). Anyway, not quite preservative and thickener-free, but still a pretty short and natural list.


Processing/Earth-friendliness: According their website, Ronnybrook's milk comes from hormone- and antibiotic-free cattle who eat grass in the summer and corn and hay silage in the winter. Milk is pasteurized, but not homogenized. Also, the drinkable yogurt bottles are #1 plastic—easily recyclable! (And if you consider them two servings apiece like I do, that means even less waste overall since you'll only be discarding every other day.)

Price: Drinkable bottles cost $2 apiece at the Ronnybrook Store in Chelsea Market and at Ronnybrook’s Greenmarket stalls. That works out to $1 per 6 ounces—a very good price for such a quality product. (You can also find the stuff around New York City at places like Whole Foods, Garden of Eden, and Dean & Deluca, and it’s delivered by FreshDirect, but expect to pay extra at all those places.)

The bottom line: This is the best-tasting drinkable yogurt I've had in the United States. It appears to come from well-treated animals, doesn’t have a ton of additives, doesn’t break the bank on sat fat or sugar, and has a terrific creamy consistency with real chunks of fruit. Plus, the price is fair, and for my fellow tristaters, it has the added benefit of being a local product. Drink up.

SCORING (see sidebar for criteria):

Blackberry and peach flavors:
taste: 5; texture: 3; sugar: 1; sat fat: 1; price: 2; naturally sweetened: 1; animal friendliness: 1; recyclable: 1
TOTAL = 15/20

Mango flavor:
taste: 4; texture: 2.5; novelty: 1; sugar: 1; sat fat: 1; price: 2; naturally sweetened: 1; animal friendliness: 1; recyclable: 1
TOTAL = 14.5/20

Link: Ronnybrook Farm Dairy.