Sunday, December 22, 2013

Top Ten of 2013...#10 Yogurt



It's that time of the year. Time for a plethora of Top Ten lists. Many produce them and guess what, they're utterly subjective filler. Something to plug into copy space so that the writer can take time off to finish his/her holiday errands. So here are My Top Ten Favorite Things of 2013. Some have been around awhile, I generally discover things later than most. I'm going to dribble them out one day at a time, many are completely frivolous because remember: they're filler so that I can do Christmas things. (Repeated intro from yesterday, more filler.)


Frozen cherry yogurt and my favorite spoon


My Favorite New Comfort Food of 2013. Ice cream and milkshakes are just not good for you, so I was delighted at how much I liked frozen cherry yogurt. Love it. Love it. Love it. Always in the freezer waiting on me when I get home. And yogurt is good for you, so frozen yogurt must be equally beneficial only a little more sedate. 

Let's look at the ingredients: 1. Cultured pasteurized skim milk, (cultured milk, sounds highbrow like opera); 2. Sugar, that's not good; 3. Corn syrup, corn sounds good 4. Dark sweet cherry puree, now that's healthy from a blender; 5. Dark sweet cherries, more fruit, that's good; 6. Buttermilk, butter's OK, isn't it? Margarine is now bad, right? 7. Whey, more dairy; 8. Cellulose gel, isn't that plant gel? 9. Mono- and diglycerides(a glyceride consisting of two fatty acid chains covalently bonded to a glycerol molecule through ester linkages. Eliot, I need a little help on this one); 10. Guar gum, more plant gum; 11. Locust bean gum, more gum, but I think a lot of gum's OK. Like the bottom of my desk in the fourth grade; 12. Polysorbate 80 (a substance that stabilizes an emulsion by increasing its kinetic stability. Eliot, more help here); 13. Citric acid, i.e, lemons, limes, oranges, that sounds good; 14. Natural flavor, as opposed to unnatural. Well, OK; 15. Pectin, a gelling agent; 16. Cellulose gum, why do they need so much gum? 17. Carrageenan (a family of linear sulfated polysaccharides that are extracted from red edible seaweeds. They are widely used in foods for their gelling, thickening and stabilizing properties. Got that? Red seaweed!) and 18. Elderberry juice for color, OK, I have to admit it's a pretty color, but elderberries to make it look like cherries? What do they use to color elderberry frozen yogurt?

All this in a bowl of frozen yogurt? But why do they need all the gum and gel? It sounds like the yogurt and the cherries would fly out of the bowl in opposite directions without so many things to hold them together. 



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