Whether you like home cultured yogurt or Greek yogurt, non-dairy or plain yogurt, you can employ these simple ideas to flavor plain yogurt. Try these healthy, easy ways to enjoy your yogurt with customizable, real food additions that are as delicious as they are nourishing. You may like them better than store bought!
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If you want to ditch sugary yogurts, or if you already left them behind but miss them, you are in the right place!
Plain yogurt can be delicious. Well, some of us like it. Some kids (and kids-at-heart) don’t enjoy plain yogurt. Especially if you are used to flavored, sweetened yogurt, the plain kind seems really sour at first.
Even though I love sour, thick yogurt, I also love it with goodies! And some of my yogurt-eaters won’t eat yogurt plain. I don’t love offering fruit-flavored yogurts from the store anymore, so I add things that are better for them.
Also, it needs to be easy to flavor plain yogurt. And reasonably cost-effective. I’m not going to spend time or money on fussy procedures, pricey ingredients, or anything that isn’t really supporting our health.
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What’s Wrong with Store Bought Yogurt?
Some purchased yogurts are better than others! Many of them taste pretty good, or even great. Health-wise, you can buy some really good ones, occasionally even long-cultured ones. The best ones, health-wise, aren’t flavored.
Sugar
Those that are flavored are generally not great for us. The sugar is a big reason. Take a look at how much sugar is in these! Some are lower in sugar. Most are packed with refined sugar! Sugar substitutes lay their own health traps, so sugar-free yogurts can’t offer a good option.
Additives
You will find a number of ingredients on yogurt labels, beyond milk, cultures, sugar, and fruit. Some are pretty benign, depending on your needs. Others aren’t good at all. Anything from gums to stabilizers to fillers and preservatives is common. Heavily processed, some of these aren’t exactly food.
What about some of those things that are hard to identify? The ones you don’t have in your kitchen. What you don’t know might hurt you– read more here about additives like carrageenan, gums, etc., that are more natural but maybe not so benign. Especially for anyone with known gut or health issues.
Processing yogurt to meet commercial requirements is much harder than making yogurt in the home. Food safety, consumer preferences, and packaging for transport all affect the ways yogurt is made and the different products added to it. Low- and non-fat yogurt is especially hard to produce with a thick texture. Learn more here.
Then there are the more obviously artificial ingredients, like colors, preservatives, flavors, and fillers that are relatively avoidable if you are picky about your brand.
Texture is a real issue with yogurt. Adding all sorts of gums, fillers, stabilizers, and starches helps create a pleasing mouth feel, but isn’t so great for our health. From feeding harmful pathogens to disrupting the protective mucosal barrier in the digestive tract, yogurts with these additives may do damage alongside the benefits they offer.
Milk Quality
You can probably find yogurt made with higher quality milk, such as organic, A2, grass fed, etc. Often, these aren’t flavored, but some are. They are more expensive, as you might expect.
Fermentation Time
Another objection to most purchased yogurts is that they are cultured for a very short time, sometimes just 4-6 hours. This doesn’t make them bad, exactly. It does mean that they retain more of the natural sugar in milk (milk is high in sugar so the babies like it!) and less of the probiotics used to culture it.
Both natural sugar and quantity of helpful bacteria are reasons that the GAPS diet (and others) call for long fermenting. Less sugar + more beneficial bacteria= greater benefit + less harm.
This article is an interesting read covering some problems with commercial yogurt plus some good brands, in case you aren’t up for making yogurt but still want a good one!
Make it yourself!
Happily, making yogurt can be pretty easy. There is some effort and time involved, but you can make quite a bit at once. You can also customize your yogurt to meet your needs, such as:
- milk quality– grass fed, organic, A2, raw, etc.
- milk type– cow, goat, coconut, etc.
- specific probiotic strains to avoid (kids with PANDAS often avoid streptococcus strains, for example)
- specific probiotic strains you want for a particular purpose (like L. reuteri for SIBO and other reasons)
I like to make yogurt in the instant pot and strain it to make is super thick, saving the whey for other purposes. It is so simple and requires very little hands-on time from me.
You can use other methods– a yogurt maker is an obvious choice, but people find ways to use a slow cooker, a sous vide, a dehydrator, a cooler, or the pilot light in the oven. I have also just mixed yogurt into milk and left the jars on the counter! I have used the slow cooker and pilot light methods for making coconut milk yogurt, and they work.
How to Flavor Plain Yogurt
Once you have your excellent quality yogurt, whether home cultured or purchased, what if you want a flavor? It can be simple, or you can do something a little more involved. I do all these at different times!
Here is a simple suggestion that streamlines serving if you make your own yogurt:
Once it is ready, portion it out in jars that work for a single serving before you put it in the refrigerator. I have half-pint jars that I fill 2/3 – 3/4 full. I wish I had opted for this shape, though, for easier stirring. Leave room to add something just before serving.
If I have something like the berry syrup below, I have been known to add a couple tablespoons to each little jar, then people stir it in when they are ready to eat. Like fruit-on-the-bottom, except it’s fruit-on-the-top!
Fresh Berries
The absolute easiest way to flavor plain yogurt is to add berries on top. You can add a drizzle of honey, or not. If you pick small berries, like blueberries, you don’t need to chop them. I like to slice or chop strawberries. You have probably done this, or at least thought of it!
Any small or chopped fruit works, not just berries. Chopped peaches with cinnamon and honey is a summertime favorite for my son. Pomegranate arils with a little honey and chopped nuts are my favorite in winter. Except raspberry. Raspberries are the best anytime!
Nuts & Honey
Much like the berries, nuts or chopped nuts are simple, nourishing, and delicious. I love walnuts with a little honey drizzled on top, sometimes with a sprinkle of cinnamon. If you are trying to incorporate nuts into your diet in small amounts, this is ideal.
Of course, you could add nuts AND fruit together!
Berry Sauce
I don’t make berry sauce especially for yogurt, though you could. It is easy and fast to make, and delicious. Generally, I make it for pancakes or something else, and use the leftovers over my yogurt. Often, I pour a couple of tablespoons on top of each jar of yogurt for a grab-and-go, fruit-on-the-top option.
Here again, you don’t need anything but the berry sauce, but you could make a light meal or very hearty snack by adding nuts and berries along with the sauce.
Cranberry Sauce
This is a seasonal thing for me, but leftover cranberry sauce is delectable with plain yogurt! My favorite is this cranberry sauce made with raspberries and pineapple! This fermented cranberry relish and my classic low-sugar version are good too. The one you have is the one to use!
Similarly, any sort of jam will work well. Most are very high in sugar, but you can decide what works for you. A tablespoon or two will do it. My Christmas Jam tastes good in yogurt, too.
Frozen Fruit
Berries aren’t always in season, of course! Frozen ones, while they don’t work for every purpose, are ideal in yogurt. Just stir a few tablespoons of them in, perhaps with a touch of honey. Either thaw the berries before adding them, or stir them in the night before so that they thaw overnight, then give them another stir in the morning.
You can flavor plain yogurt in a single serving this way– use a few tablespoons of thawed berries per serving– or prepare a batch using a tub of yogurt plus a small bag of frozen berries. Or use a cup or two of frozen berries from a larger bag. See what is on sale or offered for the best price per ounce!
The first time I tried frozen berries in yogurt was on a trip we took the year we were on the GAPS diet. We cut some corners on that trip, and one of the compromises I made was buying plain yogurt. I bought it in 32-oz. tubs, making sure the ingredients were pretty good. I also bought a bag of frozen berries somewhere in the 10-16 oz. range, being sure it was just berries with no sugar added.
Once, I thawed the berries overnight, then stirred them into the yogurt with a tablespoon or two of honey in the morning. After that, I just stirred them all up in the evening. By morning, the berries thawed, so I stirred them up again so the juices would blend.
This method yields a result that is quite similar to fruity yogurt from the store. The frozen berries release plenty of juice, unlike fresh berries, and the juices color the yogurt prettily.
Fruit Salsa
If I have leftover fruit salsa, I stir it into yogurt. It is quick enough to make it specifically for yogurt, but I don’t seem to do it! It doesn’t incorporate smoothly, and so it isn’t much like fruit yogurts from the store. Flavor plain yogurt with fruit salsa for a different kind of yummy!
There you have it! You, too, can flavor plain yogurt with ingredients you love and feel good about consuming! You don’t even need much (or any) honey or sugar. Some other things to try adding:
- granola
- cacao nibs
- homemade applesauce or stewed apples
- leftover apple crisp, etc.
- pumpkin pie spice
- apple or pumpkin butter
- toasted coconut
Mix fruit, nuts and more for endless variations, and repurpose chopped fruit for scrumptious yogurt!