Appleton Creamery, Magical Breakfast Cream, & Homemade Yogurt

While up in Maine last month, we stopped by the Belfast Farmers' Market for the first time.

There was an impressive selection, but my favorite stand by far was that of Appleton Creamery, an award winning artisan cheese maker in nearby Appleton, Maine. They had a stunning variety of chèvre (rolled in herbes de Provence or marinated in olive oil or encased in beeswax or seasoned with maple and peppercorn...), as well as an assortment of other dairy products. And samples of everything! Steven buzzed around from sample to sample like a honeybee among flowers...I'm pretty sure he tried every. single. thing. :)

One product that immediately caught my eye was the sheep's milk yogurt. I love yogurt (so versatile!) and have been incrementally moving away from the mainstream brands of my youth--Yoplait, Colombo, etc--and towards the brands that take a more minimalist approach to the ingredients...no thickeners, HFCS, preservatives, etc. FAGE is my favorite.

Another reason for my heightened interest in the artisan yogurt was the fact that just that very morning I had been flipping through the French Women Don't Get Fat Cookbook by Mireille Guiliano.

(Not a huge fan. While I like her philosophy--basically a low quantity, high quality approach--I frankly found her delivery to be a little...smug. A lot of "I always..." and "I can't understand why anyone would ever..."...Bleh.)

However, she absolutely raves about yogurt, and that's something I could get behind. She calls it every woman's secret weapon, and shares a family recipe for Magical Breakfast Cream: a mixture of yogurt, honey, flax seed oil, lemon juice, grains and nuts. She swears by it as a sort of detox, perfect for when you're feeling a little bloated or like you've been a little too indulgent and need to reset.

So I decided to buy the sheep's milk yogurt, and when I asked the vendor how long it would keep, she assured me that it would be fine, unopened, for about month. She then added:

"I just made it last night, so it can't get any fresher."

Wow. That just floored me. I wanna play!

So I looked into it, and making your own yogurt looks pretty easy (in fact, it's basically 100% analogous to the way we grow bacteria in the lab when we need to produce a ton of DNA. weird.) I definitely want to give it a shot, and after some research, I added this baby to my Amazon wish list:

It's a yogurt maker (basically just an incubator) with 7 glass jars, so none of that alarming plastic leaching talk. Can't wait to try it out!

(Bubba voice): yogurt + honey...yogurt + fruit preserves...yogurt tzatziki...yogurt hamburgers...yogurt pancakes...yogurt casserole...yogurt gumbo...yogurt sausage...yogurt smoothies.......

;)

p.s.-the Magical Breakfast Cream is actually really good...with lemon and honey, how could it be bad?

p.p.s.-Appleton Creamery hosts cheesemaking workshops! Yes, please.