[Sca-cooks] Middle Eastern Food

[lilinah at earthlink.net]

On Mon, 4 Feb 2002, at 07:44:43 PST,
Jaime Declet <jjdeclet at yahoo.com> wrote:
>Question concerning yogurt in Middle Eastern period dishes.  I was under the
>impression that yogurt back then was more like sour cream today?  Is that
>correct?  My ex-father in law is from the Middle East and he always said
>that the yogurt here was not strong or thick enough.

I just realized that because i was moving and it took the phone
company three days to figure out how to hook up my phone, i had
skipped reading a whole slew of digests!!! WHAT was i THINKING???

OK, so, my response to you, Jaime, is...

a) I'm guessing your ex-father-in-law was from the Levant. The
product he was talking about was probably Labna/Lebneh/Lebni (note
that the pronunciation of the Arabic words can vary a bit from
culture to culture, and romanizations can vary as well), which is
made from yogurt, but isn't yogurt. The Persian yogurt i've had has
been more like Pavel's and not at all like lebneh.

One way to make lebneh is get some cheese cloth and line in a bowl so
there are several layers. Then take that excellent quality, pure,
whole milk yogurt (see my description below) and dump it into the
center of the cheese cloth. Pull up the edges and corners of the
cheesecloth around the yogurt and tie it shut. Then hang it up (some
folks tie it to the kitchen sink spout) so that the liquid/water/whey
gradually drains out of the yogurt and into the bowl. Some folks
leave it overnight, some folks fewer hours. It should be thicker than
sour cream - all the lebneh i've had, both commercially and homemade,
has been denser than commercial sour cream.

You can drink the whey afterwards for a refreshing sort of buttermilk
drink, although it will be thinner than buttermilk - most commercial
buttermilk is made of cultured milk anyway, although sometimes you
can find real churned buttermilk.

b) we don't known exactly what "period" Near Eastern yogurt was like.

I just use regular yogurt, Pavel's Russian-Style Whole Milk Yogurt
...well, in some ways it isn't regular, since, unlike most brands, it
has no stabilizers added, being made exclusively of milk and yogurt
cultures. I consider this the very best yogurt. I suspect that for
average American taste it will be too tangy, but it is excellent for
cooking.

I would add that in my experience cooking "period" Near Eastern
dishes that contain yogurt, the flavor is, in my opinion, much better
with whole milk yogurt rather than with some reduced fat version. I
can taste/feel the difference. And i noticed a difference between the
same recipe made with Pavel's and with some other brand of yogurt.
Pavel's is a local (SF Bay Area) brand, but i imagine that other
regions have a brand of high quality yogurt made without added
stabilizers.

Of course, anyone who has had *real* cream cheese, not that nasty
gummy "Philadelphia" brand stuff, can guess at some of the
differences in texture between pure milk products and products
thickened with stabilizers, no matter how natural those thickeners
and stabilizers are.

As for tanginess that some other posters have mentioned: I am certain
that modern American yogurts (or the bacilli that produce the yogurt)
are processed in such as way as to make them less sour, since even
the unsweetened brands are very bland and lacking in the appropriate
tang that yogurt ought to have, even many unsweetened "health food"
brands (Continental? Feh!). The Bulgarian yogurt i had when i lived
in Indonesia (imported from Bulgaria in narrow glass bottles) was a
real eye-opener - and it was meant to be drunk, not eaten with a
spoon.

The drive towards sweeter and sweeter products is disturbing to me.
As someone who appreciates food with a range of flavors and textures,
i prefer variety, not just sweet or salty.

For example, i bought some Ragu spaghetti sauce once because i was
broke and it was on sale REEEEL cheap. I threw it away, because it
tasted like tomato syrup to me. I just couldn't eat it. I ate my
noodles with butter and Parmesan. I find it hard to find a good salad
dressing that doesn't taste like syrup - i don't mind a dash of sugar
to balance the flavors, but, really, i don't want slightly sour
herb-scented syrup on my salad (i tend to buy Annie's brand, but even
they make some awfully sweet dressings).

I raised my daughter with Westbrae Foods' "Unketchup" - the FDA
stipulates that to be called ketchup/catsup/etc., the product must
contain a minimum amount of sweetener and since is has NO sweetener
(no added corn syrup, fructose, sugar/sucrose, maltose, dextrose; no
honey; no concentrated fruit juice), just tomatoes, vinegar, herbs
and spices, etc., it is called "Unketchup". The sweetness comes from
the cooked down tomatoes themselves. Anyway, when my daughter tasted
commercial ketchup she was rather surprised at the flavor which is so
overpoweringly sweet. If i'm in a restaurant and i want to put some
ketchup on something, like home-fries, i always add some Tabasco (and
i really don't like Tabasco), to tone down the sweetness.

Anyway, enough ranting about sweetness. As you can tell, i don't have
much of a sweet tooth. Back to yogurt and lebneh.

Anahita