Summertime herbs make versatile herbed yogurt cheese

Good recipe.

Hint:

Make your own yogurt with good quality milk.

Just use some regular, cheap 100yen/container yogurt. No need for the fancy "Greek" stuff (if you can even find it here).

Put the regular yogurt into a single cup paper coffee filter and holder (holder is 100yen, pack of 100 filters also 100yen)

Cover with plastic wrap and let it drain in the fridge into a cup (like coffee). In a few hours it'll have the consistancy of "Greek" yogurt.

For "cheese", wait 24hrs+ and maybe mix in a teaspoon of either vinegar or lemon juice beforehand, as well as salt. If using dried herbs, mix those in beforehand too.

Supey11,

Some good ideas.

I like that you put "Greek" in quotes because there is NO Greek yogurt - it's just marketing. When I was a kid, the yogurt came in little pots and was so thick that if you tipped the pot upside down, it wouldn't fall out. This is how yogurt was. Then came supermarkets. Supermarkets found it cost effective to make "yogurt" in the container, using what's left over after the butter, cream, milk has been taken out. They marketed it as "low calorie," which it certainly was because it's basically skimmed milk. So you can get 500 ml of this muck for between one and two hundred yen.

You can strain the whey out of this, but, to be honest, it's lipstick on a pig. It's MUCH better to make your own. I wouldn't use any milk cheaper than 250 yen.

Here's another hint. If the "cheese" you get from straining all the liquid out of yogurt is sour, it's sour because of lactic acid, so you need to change the pH. Baking powder (without aluminium) is very alkaline and so will change the pH and make it sweet and creamy. It will bubble up as CO2 is released, but if you keep mixing it, the CO2 will eventually disappear.