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.

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.