Active culture

One of the first things I like to do when I visit a new country is head to the grocery store and see what delights or surprises me, what is different from other countries. When I first came to Turkey on a group vacation with five of my friends (the vacation from which I sorta kinda never returned), we giggled with shock at the shelves of yogurt buckets— literally buckets of yogurt, 3kg each, with a handle on top like a container of paint. I thought, how on earth could anyone, even a family, consume that much yogurt?

Fast-forward three years.

In our little home we now regularly buy the 3kg bucket-o-yogurt, and it lasts maybe a few days at most. Turks use yogurt for everything, and I’ve picked up the habit. I come from a culture where sour cream is a common condiment, and I quickly discovered that Turkish yogurt is not a bad substitute. Also, Turks are not big on fresh milk; they tend to drink that boxed UHT stuff that tastes like it’s a month old, and on the rare occasions when you can find fresh milk it generally expires the next day and already smells a bit sour when you buy it. So if you live in Turkey and you’re concered about calcium intake (I suppose this is more of an issue for women than men), yogurt quickly becomes your friend.

When I first moved here, I used to buy a 350 gram container of yogurt, and it would pretty much last me forever. I’d eventually throw half of it away because it would expire before I got a chance to figure out how I was going to make use of it. As I became more familiar with and started to adopt Turkish dietary habits, however, I graduated to buying the 650 gram container, and when Emirhan and I moved in together we upgraded to purchasing a kilogram at a time. It grew from there, and now we can go through a 3kg bucket in less than a week, no problem.

Turkish yogurt has a fantastic flavour, and my favourite part of it is the crust. Yogurt forms a crust on its surface as it settles, which most if not all Western yogurt manufacturers scrape off and throw away during the packaging process. This makes me sad, because since moving to Turkey I’ve discoved that the crust is the best part (those who live in England will understand what I mean because clotted cream has a similar crust). Give me a bowl of yogurt crust drizzled with honey… heaven. Why yes, I am the girl who likes edge brownies and the corner piece of lasagne, why do you ask?

I wonder if there are any American or European yogurt companies that leave the crust on the yogurt— anyone know of any?