Blueberry frozen yogurt - high fibre!

I have a lot of dried blueberries left over from baking fruit cakes.  I've been experimenting with frozen yogurts, made with milk I pre-treat with lactase to reduce the lactose in yogurt still further.  This fro-yo was made by cooking the blueberries in water until they were soft, blitzing in a blender, sieving and then mixing with the yogurt.  This makes a high-fibre, no added sugar frozen yogurt.

Ingredients
200g dried blueberries
200ml water
500ml yogurt
1 tbsp vodka

agave syrup to taste if needed

Cook the blueberries in the water until they are soft.  Blitz - it will produce a very thick puree.  Sieve to remove the blueberry seeds.  Leave to cool.

Stir the cooled puree into the yogurt with the vodka.  If you don't want to use any alcohol you will need to remember to get the yogurt out of the freezer a few minutes before you want to use it.  The alcohol acts as an anti-freeze, making it scoopable straight from the freezer.  Check the flavour.  If you want it a bit sweeter, add some syrup.  I use agave for its slow release (low GI) qualities.

Icecream guides recommend that you leave the mixture in the fridge for a few hours before putting in the ice-cream machine.  Process until the mixture is thickening and then put in a plastic tub in the freezer.  Remember to label!

Gooseberry and elderflower frozen yogurt - lactose free

On with the frozen yogurt experiments.  I made two litres of the treated milk yogurt, so have enough for four flavours.  Flavour three is based on the last of my home-grown gooseberries from the previous house.  I have elderflower cordial in the fridge, so rather than adding sugar syrup I added the cordial.  I used Genepi Grad Tetra Bigallet liqueur, bought from a lovely shop in Bourg St Maurice when we did our campervan skiing trip earlier this year.  This liqueur is 50% Vol., so only used 1.5tsp for the whole batch.  It still made the mixture soft scoop straight from the freezer, so even less is necessary at these concentrations.

The flavour is light and zingy, and the colour a subtle pale green.  It would be very good served with almond tuille.

Ingredients
400g yogurt - mine is lactase-treated channel island full fat milk
300g english gooseberries, cooked and sieved to remove the seeds
100ml elderflower cordial
1.5tsp Genepi liqueur

After tasting the mixture, and before freezing, I also added 4 tsp of sugar.  Decide for yourself if the mix is sweet enough; it will depend on how sweet your gooseberries are.

Mix gooseberry puree with other ingredients.  Pour into ice-cream maker.  When beginning to firm, transfer to freezer safe container and freeze until wanted.

Caramelised apricots and caramel frozen yogurt - lactose free

More adventures with my Channel Island yogurt where I pre-treated the milk with lactase.  This time a simple caramel frozen yogurt, made with a couple of tablespoons of soft brown sugar, cooked gently until it just began changing colour, a desert spoonful of Pineau des Charentes, picked up on a visit to some friends in western France, and a teaspoon of vanilla.  Let the caramel cool before adding the alcohol or it will evaporate, leaving a pleasant taste but not retaining its anti-freeze qualities.  Cool, mix with 500g yogurt and freeze in an ice-cream maker.

I bought some reasonable looking apricots but they were not as sumptuous as I wished - apricots really need to be picked ripe off the tree in the sunshine.  Cut each in half, sprinkle more of the brown sugar in wide pan and place the cut apricots on the sugar.  Cook gently on both sides.  The juice from the apricots will give the caramel sauce a lovely zingy flavour.

Serve with a scoop of the frozen yogurt and a little of the caramel drizzled over.

I only have white crockery - terrible for photographing very pale ice-cream!  I should have put this in a glass and photographed against a coloured background, but I ate my desert before I put the photos on the computer.  Tastes much better than it looks.

lactase treatment of cream - use twice the lactase

I have been trying out lactase treatment of milk.  I thought that cream responded less well than milk so wrote to the manufacturer to ask for advice.  Since I have noticed that other people have had the same query here is the response:

"Thank you for email.

There is a possibility that increased fat content of the cream may slow down the action of the enzyme. These two products’ weight also differs significantly.

My recommendation is to use twice the amount of lactase enzyme in cream. I hope that will prevent any gastrointestinal symptoms.

I hope you find this useful.

Kind Regards,

Evi Vagvolgyi

Technical Department

BioCare Limited"

I am very impressed by the speed of their response though slightly surprised that I didn't get data rather than a 'possibility' statement.  

Ice cream - aiming towards lactose-free

coffee icecream

Lactose intolerance is a common adjunct of coeliac disease, though for some people the healing of their villi means this is short-lived problem.  For lots of people, though, lactose intolerance is a permanent  issue.

OK, so we could just skip milk products, but there is a problem with the work 'just'.  Milk is in lots of foodstuffs (even medicines are bulked out with lactose - when I asked about a product to help deal with gluten-intolerance it turned out it had lactose in it. Duh!). Also, milk makes yummy foodstuffs.  Having spent a lifetime of puritanical foods as I was instinctively avoiding gluten and lactose, and adeptly producing erroneous reasons why, I now want to eat icecream, cheese, etc and enjoy them.

I found that pre-treating milk with lactase drops is very effective.  I can handle the residual small amounts of lactose.  Having made gratins and sauces and yogurt I moved onto fromage blanc successfully.  There were all made with whole jersey milk.  I pre-treated a carton of whipping cream  and used it to make ice-cream.   I simply added a little sugar and some strong espresso coffee and rum and put it in the ice-cream maker.

espresso icecream - texture

The icecream came out a little grainy (over mixed I think) and a little brittle (sugar syrup needed?). It tasted very good and I  will keep at the experiments.

However, I don't think the lactase had worked as well in the cream as in the milk.  I looked on the internet to see if there were any comments on cream and lactase.  All I found were other people asking the same question and no-one giving a competent answer.

I wrote to the people I bought the lactase from.  They simply repeated the milk-treatment instructions (why didn't they read the question!).  I have written to the company they buy the product from.  I await their answer.

Having accidental made an 'almost mozzarella' yesterday by making a sauce with the fromage blanc and over heating it I would like to have a go at making proper mozzarella.  The milk solids coagulated so I made a garlic and 'cheese' bread with one of ready-made pizza bases from the freezer.

almost mozzarella

I have found a supplier of all the kit and instructions and even courses.  I would like, first, to know if there is a interaction between fat levels and lactase effectiveness.


Aged cheeses have a lot less lactose than soft cheeses, so a little mature Parmesan is OK, and the cream cheese available in the stores is OK, but we do miss the entertainment a mozzarella gives to a pizza, and the summery fresh buffalo mozzarella with properly ripe tomatoes and basil.

Fromage blanc - made with milk pre-treated with lactase

fromage blanc with fruit

Its a tricky business knowing how much lactose is left in cultured / fermented milk products.  I know I can't normally eat cheese, yoghurt etc without experiencing ill effects, so I have been trying out various uses of milk I have pre-treated with lactase.

Today's adventure was to make fromage blanc - white cheese, as close to the desert we get in the French Alps as possible.

I bought some lactic culture form Lyofast, Strain MO 032, a couple of years ago.  I used some from the sachet, and the rest I put in the freezer.  I had no idea whether the culture was still viable - I only remembered where it was as I found it every time I cleaned the freezer!

A litre of jersey milk was treated for 24hrs with six drops of lactase.  I then stirred in the freeze-dried lactic culture (without warming the milk) and put it in my yoghurt maker.  This is an electric warming pot that keeps the temperature steady at the right point. I have the yoghurt maker uk from Lakeland Ltd.  I used to use a thermos but they are harder to clean, and the thermos soon smells of yoghurt even when scrubbed.

I left it overnight and the milk set to a smooth curd. I strained this through some cheesecloth then spooned some of the curd into little perforated heart -shaped moulds to drain further.

I served it with mixed fruit compot (last year's garden produce) and, on the blue plate, some lactase-treated cream.

fromage blanc, fruit and cream

This has a flavour and texture that is different from yoghurt.  It is smooth, mild and holds it's shape.  I am running another batch using a spoonful of today's curd to see if it works the same way yoghurt does.  I only buy a 'new' pot of starter yoghurt when I have forgotten to keep some of the previous batch, so it lives forever the same way my sourdough cultures used to.

Lactose-free / reduced lactose yogurt

lactose-free yogurt with berry compot

I have been experimenting with making my own reduced-lactose yogurt.  I got lactase drops from Bodykind; I am sure there are many other suppliers but these had both the lactase and the glutenzyme I wanted.

The lactase is very easy to use.  You just put four drops per pint ( I used six for the litre) into the milk, stir it, and leave for 24hrs in the fridge.  The milk tastes a little sweeter when the lactase has broken down the lactose into its constituent smaller sugars.  I have used treated milk to make yogurt, a drained yogurt that is like a soft cheese, and paneer.  The end results in each case were very similar to those made from untreated milk, with just the faint extra sweetness.

If you want to make yogurt treat the milk first and then add the yogurt starter.  The lactase doesnt work in an acidic environment (which I learnt by reading after I had tried it) so you just end up with normal yogurt if you put the lactase in at the same time as the spoonful of yougurt.  Yogurt has less lactase in it than milk but still enough to cause me colic.

The Wikipedia aricial on lactose intolerance is interesting and clearly written.  It is worth reading for its comments on which products have most lactase.

I ate enough yogurt last night to have expected problems this morning ( sorry- but I don't have a lab to test, have to use my own body). My enjoyment of the channel island milk yogurt with mixed berry compot last night was not marred by pain this morning.

You might wonder why I don't just buy the ready made lactose-free milk.  I don't like to be limited to one type of milk, TT likes milk from Jersey and Guernsey cows, and if you want to make icecreams, soft cheese, pannecotta, yogurt etc then being able to start with the right type of milk is useful.  The lactose free milk is semi-skimmed, and for the potatoes dauphinoise I intend to make next a creamier milk is better.  Once you have the lactase drops you can do what you like, and as the lactase free milk is more expensive, getting the drops and keeping them in the fridge works out about the same I think (not actually calculated, but it is close enough).

I have tried the lactase-free cheeses available in the supermarkets.  I find the cream cheese a pleasant addition, but the 'hard' cheese is a bit flavourless.  I have been tending to make pizzas using blobs of the cream cheese and a bit of parmesan.  This gives a complelety different style of pizza to mozzarella, but it is pretty good and means I don't have to constantly calculate how many mouthfulls I can eat without suffering.  Whilst the parmesan is the standard reggiano, the longer cheeses are matured the less lactose they have in them, so going for a highly- flavoured aged cheese you reduce the amount of lactose you eat.

I have some cheese making culture in my freezer, which I bought for making fromage blanc.  I'll be using that on my treated milk shortly as well.  Maybe a cheese making course?