McDonald's Shamrock Shakes Are Back Again

Hey, heads up, Shamrock Shake fans! They're back at the local McDonald's for a limited time, and for the first time they're being offered nationwide.

I loved Shamrock Shakes when I was a kid, and they're still my faves. Ever since I had my first one when I was eleven, I've looked forward to the St. Patrick's Day season when Mickey Dee's would bring them back.

i don't like the new default way McD's serves their shakes as part of the McCafe lineup, though - really, who needs whipped cream and a cherry on top of a shake?  I got one all decked out in the finery one time, and was totally unimpressed.  Just plain for me from now on, please.

LaYogurt (Triple Berry)

First of all, this isn't usually the kind of yogurt I normally buy. I'm not buying into this whole "probiotic" thing, for example - all active culture yogurts are "probiotic."  Also, I like my yogurt to be interesting, so I go with unusual flavors or types of milk. But I got a wicked sweet deal on a full case ($1.99, or about 17 cents each) of these and couldn't pass it up.

So. LaYogurt is pretty run-of-the-mill stuff. The Triple Berry flavoring comes from juice, which is mixed with yogurt, sugar, and thickening agents to create a very smooth and even consistency. It's not the best yogurt in the world, but it is not heinous either. Perfectly acceptable (though a bit on the sweet side) especially for the price I paid.

Meyenberg Low Fat Goat Milk

If you've grown up drinking cow's milk, goat milk can be an acquired taste. Goat milk is stronger in flavor (I've heard it described as "gamey" or "strongly goaty") and has a different aftertaste than cow's milk.

As for me, I've always liked goat milk, and I can't resist picking up a quart when I find it (which isn't very often, BTW - goat milk is still considered a "specialty item" and a lot of supermarkets don't regularly carry it.)  For that matter, I like goat milk yogurt and goat cheese, too.  Hell, if I thought I could get away with it, I would keep a nanny goat here in my quiet suburban neighborhood and be all Goat Milk Dairyman with her.

Anyway. Different brands of goat milk seem to have different goaty intensities.  I recently picked up a quart of Meyenberg Low Fat Goat Milk and really enjoyed it. But I have to say it was much stronger in flavor than some of the other goat milks I've had.  It had a very distinctive "barnyard taste," which is something that some people find objectionable but I find interesting.

I would certainly buy it again, especially if I also have Cap'n Crunch in the house. Because that's something else about goat milk: it is awesome on Cap'n Crunch.

It's National Milkshake Day!

You know what that means, right?

Well, it might mean something entirely different for you. For me, and Holyoke Community College, that means that today is Free Smoothie/Milkshake Day, sponsored by our Student Activities office and the folks at f'real Milkshakes and their rolling Milkshake Wagon. (Note: I have no idea if it's really called the Milkshake Wagon. It just sounded good.)

If you had been in line with me, you would have heard
students of all ages grumbling about wanting
that damn smoothie "NOW, DAMMIT."

f'real milkshakes started showing up this semester in HCC's cafeteria at a whopping $3.79 a pop, but you can find them using f'real's store finder and they'll cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $2.50.

So, are these milkshakes any good? In a word, yes. Creamy, smooth, and made with a thickness that you get to choose, these shakes start with ice cream in a cup and are blended to the way you want them. (More or less, of course. There's three settings to choose from: less thick, regular, and more thick. Less thick is a little runny, regular is like a standard milkshake, and more thick is more like the still-mostly-ice-cream 'shakes you get at McDonalds.)

Their smoothies are even better. Creamy, fruity, and subtly sweet, the smoothies are my favorite of the bunch. Made the same way as the shakes are, plug them into the machine, select your thickness, and away you go.

The smoothies and shakes are made with a standalone, ready-to-use blender that operates with a fully integrated LCD touchscreen. Its sensors know when you've placed a milkshake cup in it, and bring up the prompt for thickness. Select what you're craving, and that's it. Sometimes the screen plays an animation, sometimes it does something else like give company history or little trivia bits. Either way, in about 45 seconds, the machine is done and so is your shake. And the blender is self-cleaning after every blend, so you never have to worry about cross-shake contamination.

But seriously, with ten regular flavors from milkshakes to smoothies to frozen cappuccinos, and two limited edition flavors (Reese's peanut butter cup and mint chocolate) you really can't go wrong. You'll have a tasty smoothie or shake every time.

So go out there and celebrate National Milkshake Day. Go get a f'real shake and go make yourself happy.

Links:
f'real Main Website - the epicenter of delicious frozen drinks

Disclaimer: This is NOT a sponsored post. I'm not being paid by f'real Milkshakes for advertisement, or by Holyoke Community College. I just freaking LOVE milkshakes.

Coronado Goat's Milk Lollipops

Goat's milk, I'm told, is an acquired taste. One of my esteemed culinary fellow travelers tells me that he can "taste the goat" with every sip. While I acknowledge that goat's milk does taste different from that of the cow, I don't find the flavor unpleasant.

And so it was that when I saw a long cellophane strip of these goat's milk lollipops at the local Price/Rite, I dropped them into my shopping cart. They were too interesting to leave behind.

And they are DELICIOUS. Beautiful smooth and creamy dulce de leche without any goatiness at all. They're totally awesome.

If you see them, buy them. You will not be disappointed.

Expired Yogurt

Will eating yogurt past the "expiration date" printed on the cup kill you?  I found a couple of forgotten yogurts in the back of my fridge.  Let's find out if they've retained their deliciousness.

Siggi's Skyr (Icelandic strained non-fat yogurt)

Expiration date: 17 March 2011

Date opened: 1 May 2011

Comments:

Yogurt had turned a light brown color. There was little or no liquid seepage. Very thick - the yogurt mass actually cracked when it was scooped. Pronouncedly sour and spoiled flavor. I could barely choke down half a spoonful.

Breyer's Fruit-on-the-Bottom Strawberry

Expiration date: 5 March 2011

Date Opened: 1 May 2011

Comments:

Some separation had occurred; a pool of clear liquid was at the top of the container but was readily stirred back into the yogurt. This was quite delicious and tasted as good as it might have before its expiration date.

Kate's Real Buttermilk

How many of you use buttermilk in your kitchen?  Cultured buttermilk is a versatile product - great for helping coat fried foods, and delicious as the liquid in baked products like biscuits and pancakes, where the acidity helps activate the leavening.

What you may not know is the commercial buttermilk you normally buy in the store isn't actually real buttermilk at all, and hasn't been for more than 60 years. When you buy a quart of "buttermilk" at the grocery store, you normally get cultured skim milk. It tastes like very thin, sharp sour cream, but it doesn't taste like real buttermilk.

Buttermilk - real, honest buttermilk - is a thin and milky liquid whey that is left over when the fat in cream has been churned into butter.  The buttermilk is cultured to thicken it and develop the flavor.  Just about the only way to get real buttermilk today is to own your own cow or find a specialty dairy that still produces it. 

Here in New England, there is just such a dairy - Kate's Homemade Butter in Old Orchard Beach, Maine. Kate's is a family-run operation, large enough to be able to distribute regionally for the northeast, but small enough to still take the time and care necessary to produce butter and buttermilk the way they once were produced by everyone.

If the only buttermilk you've ever tried has been the treated-and-thickened skim milk variety, you will be awed by the flavor difference between that and real buttermilk. Real buttermilk is not quite as thick as the manufactured variety, but it's smoother and less "grainy."  Rather than the bland, sour-yogurt flavor of factory buttermilk, real buttermilk has a pleasant bite to it, a little like kefir but with a delicious butter flavor added.  If you live in the Northeast, you can find Kate's at Stop & Shop (where I buy it), Hannaford, Shaw's, Big Y, Whole Foods, Roche Brothers, and Market Basket.

Whippers Twisted Smoothies

There have been many times that I've found and reviewed products only to discover that they have been failures in the marketplace and I may have been tasting one of the last remaining examples.  Most of the time, the products in question are crap and the marketplace has done it's job well in expunging them.

Other times, however, the products don't seem to be that sucky and I  don't understand what  went wrong.  Such is the case with Whippers Twisted Smoothies.

They were introduced last year as a low-calorie drink for active kids, and were made with fruit juices, skim milk, natural flavorings and colors, a bit of sugar and a bit of stevia for sweetening.  Lynnafred and I found all three of the Whippers flavors recently, tried them, and were really impressed by their quality.

Orange Cream - Tastes just like a slightly soured melted Creamsicle (but,  of course, thinner in texture.)Thee was hint of an artificial sweetener aftertaste, but it wasn't very strong.  It was okay, but strange.  Maybe a bit too strange.

Blueberry Acai - Since acai tastes like Extract Of Sour Ass, I wasn't optimistic that the Blueberry Acai flavor was going to be any good.  Surprise!  Because the blend was heavy on the blueberry and light on the assberry, the overall flavor was pleasant, if not quite delicious, and there was less of an aftertaste than there was with the Orange Cream.

Strawberries and Cream - This one was the best of all three, with a smooth and well-balanced flavor profile that minimized the artificial-sweetener aftertaste. Lynnafred sniffed at the bottle, took a sip and said, "This smells and tastes just like strawberry PEZ.  And that's awesome."

So, I guess, one out of three ain't bad, right?


After our taste tests, I decided to see if we could find more Whippers online (I had never seen them in the supermarkets and knew there wasn't going to be a local source.)  The side of the bottle gave three sources:


Buy Whippers on-line at thirstmonger.com - Thirstmonger is an awesome site for fans of hard-to-find and unusual beverages. They have a huge inventory of stuff from everywhere, and using their search function to find Whippers will quickly bring up product pages for all three flavors.  Clicking on them, however, will reveal them to be Out Of Stock.


Their Facebook page - Drink Whippers - hasn't had any activity since January 2010.  And their Twitter account is a digital ghost town: 4 followers, 0 Tweets, 0 Following, 0 Listed.


Special Note:


Turns out Jess reviewed this very same product almost exactly a year ago for her blog, Foodette Reviews.  Click on over and see how she hated them a lot more deeply than I did. 

Yogu Yogurt flavored drink

When I was a kid, Dave used to buy me these drinks every now and then that were flavored like fruit and yogurt. He used to buy me the ones that were flavored like honeydew melon, because melon is one of my favorite flavors for anything ever. Then the store he used to get them from closed and we couldn't find them anymore.

So, while perusing the Korean market the other day, I stumbled across Yogu yogurt flavored drinks and bust out into a grin. "Remember these?" I asked, showing them to Dave. For nostalgia reasons, I had to pick one up. They didn't have my beloved honeydew, though, so I had to settle for strawberry.

They're not as good as I remember them being, but few things in life are. I, for some reason, always found artificial strawberry flavor to be kind of nice, so the artificial flavor really didn't bother me. It was a lot sweeter than I remembered it being, though, and a look at the ingredients (which were in English - something I don't remember from when I was a kid. I remember them being in either Korean or Chinese.) told me that it has high fructose corn syurp, sugar, and sweetened condensed milk in it. Other than that, though, it did have a nice kind of tangy yogurt-y background flavor to it.

I probably won't buy this again, but it was nice to see something that I loved as a kid again and even better to get to taste it now that I've grown up a bit.

Where Is Your Milk From?

I buy milk from a small dairy farm a couple of miles from my house:  Trinity Farm, on Oliver Road in Enfield CT, run by Mike and Dale Smyth and their children (and even grandchildren.)  The herd grazes in the pastures behind Trinity's yellow dairy barn, and the milk is pasteurized, homogenized, bottled in real glass milk bottles, and sold to the public right there at the farm.  I've toured the bottling line, been nuzzled by a few friendly Holsteins, and helped carry cases of milk into the salesroom a time or two when the place was real busy and the display fridges needed restocking.  I know and trust the Smyth family, and every time we pour a glass of milk or add some half-and-half to our coffee we're not only enjoying a superior product, we're helping keep local agriculture alive and well in our piece of the Valley.  We know exactly where our milk comes from.

Unfortunately, not everyone can say the same thing.  There might not be a dairy right down the road from you - and even if there is, most dairies sell their milk to big processors or co-ops and don't sell directly to consumers.  So how do you find out where your milk (and some other dairy products) are from?

On most dairy products, you'll find a code printed on the container alongside the sell-by date.  That code will reveal the source of the product, if only you had a way of decyphering it.  And now you do!

On the where is my milk from? website (http://whereismymilkfrom.com/) you can find out just about everything you need to know:  How to find the codes that will tell you about your dairy products; what the parts of the code mean; and how to enter them into the site for lookup.  where is my milk from?  makes finding the source of your milk products easy by using the FDA's IMS (Interstate Milk Shippers) List as a data source.  where is my milk from? even pinpoints the location using Google Maps whenever possible.

I plugged in a code from a plastic milk jug at Costco - 25-100 - and discovered that the milk actually came from Garelick Farms in Franklin, MA (a huge New England dairy company owned by Dean Foods.)

I also poked through my refrigerator to see what else I could track down, and found a couple of surprises:

Kirkland (Costco) brand butter - I buy butter at Costco because the price is very good and I couldn't detect a quality difference between it and national favorite Land O Lakes.  No surprise there - the code, 06-06, reveals that the butter is actually made by Land O Lakes Inc in Tulare CA.

Hood Sour Cream - I only buy sour cream that is made from cream and culture and perhaps some salt.  I refuse to buy it if it has fillers like xanthan gum or food starch.    Imagine my surprise when I found that the Hood Sour Cream code, 50-19, revealed it to have been made by the Cabot Co-Op Creamery in Cabot VT.  I never buy Cabot's own brand sour cream because it contains modified food starch, guar gum, carageenan, and locust bean gum.

Cabot Whipped Cream lists plant code 37-046, which comes back to Alamana Foods Inc of Burlington NC, a huge manufacturer of private label aerosol whipped creams.  How many people buy Cabot whipped cream thinking they're buying a product from a charming Vermont dairy farm?

Give it a try.  Find some dairy products in your fridge - cream, half-and-half, yogurt, whatever - and plug the codes into the where is my milk from? search box.  You might be surprised at what you find.

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Yancy's Fancy XXX Sharp Cheddar

Yancy's Fancy cheeses are relatively new to my area; they call themselves "New York's Artisan Cheese" which is kind of puffing out their chest a little because, while the cheese is pretty damn good, I wouldn't go so far as to call the varieties I've tried "artisan" cheese.  I'd like to reserve that designation for small-batch craft-made cheeses from small localized dairies - but at the same time, I realize that artisan and artisanal are as much empty marketing terms as they are actually descriptive.

Okay, so enough ranting.  How's the cheese?  Like I said, pretty damn good.  XXX Sharp Cheddar is an 18-month aged hard cheese, moderately sharp, creamy on the tongue with just the right amount of cheddary bite and no graininess or calcium lactate crystals.

While I didn't find it to be an amazing cheddar like, say, the stuff made in Granville MA at the Granville Country Store or the cheeses I've bought at Jewett's Cheese House in Earlville NY, it ranks at least as good as the Cabot VT Sharp Cheddar available just about everywhere - and it's a bit less expensive.

So - Welcome to New England, Yancy's Fancy.  We're happy to have a new cheese here from our neighbors in New York State. 
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Dollar Store Nightmares: Butter Blend Spread Solids

I swear, the refrigerated sections of dollar stores are the nutritional equivalents of stepping outside Vault 101 in Fallout3. Check out this "spread," which we are led to believe is supposed to be analogous to butter:

"Butter Blend Spread Solids." The very name sounds like something wet and vaguely chunky that got caught in an industrial filth strainer. A quick check of the ingredient list shows that both "water" and "palm kernel oil" appear near the top of the list, and "butter" down towards the bottom, which should give us all a pretty good idea of the type of thing we're dealing with here.

Also, because my sense of humor seems to have stopped developing sometime around eighth grade, I laughed when I realized that their logo seems to have been borrowed from an an ASCII representation of a penis. 8===>

Turkish Cheese 4 - Labneh

Strictly speaking, labneh isn't really a cheese, it's a thoroughly strained yogurt. But I'm including it in this overview because it's often referred to as "yogurt cheese."

The labneh available at my local store is made by Ülker, a major Turkish manufacturer of food products for international export. It's smooth and mild, with a rich buttery taste and just the slightest hint of yogurt's sourness - in fact, it reminds me more of crème fraîche than it does of other strained yogurts I've had. I especially enjoy it spread on toast in the morning, topped with a bit of blackcurrant jam.

You can use it as an alternative to sour cream or cream cheese for dips, spreads, or canapes (try stirring in some chopped green olives and using it to stuff tender little celery sticks. Delicious.) And labneh's buttery taste makes it go beautifully with fruit.

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Stone Ridge Creamery Ice Cream

With regular prices for brand-name ice cream hovering around $6.00 per "container" these days, I hardly ever buy the stuff unless it's on sale - and then I buy the limit and pack the deep freeze so I can go a couple of months between purchases.

I also keep an eye open for lower-priced alternative brands, which is how I found Stone Ridge Creamery ice cream in the case over at Shaw's.

Stone Ridge Creamery is a "private label" ice cream, made by SuperValu, a conglomerate that owns supermarket chains covering every segment of the grocery retail market from "premium" stores like Shaw's in New England and Bristol Farms in California, all the way down the ladder to national no-frills "limited selection" markets like Save-A-Lot. I didn't know that when I picked up a package of their vanilla "light" ice cream and a similar package of their regular chocolate at the local Shaw's. The low price ($2.50) caught my eye, and the well-designed packaging kept my attention. I chose "basic flavors" just to get an idea of what the stuff was like. Only later, after we had tasted the product, did I look closer at the packaging to see who the manufacturer was.

The light vanilla ice cream is pretty decent. It has good body and scoops tightly (I've noticed that some ice milks and light ice creams scoop out in fragile curls.) The ice cream itself is loaded with tiny flecks of genuine vanilla bean just like more expensive premium brands. Although the label claims half the fat and a third the calories of regular ice cream, it has a rich mouthfeel that is nearly indistinguishable from premium ice cream.

Unfortunately, the actual taste of the ice cream doesn't follow through with the same level of quality; the vanilla flavor isn't strong and robust as one would expect, but rather a bit weak and subtle on its own. Although that's a bit disappointing for eating straight up, it might not matter so much if you usually eat your ice cream with syrups or toppings, or as a base for a milkshake - the other flavoring components will make up for it.

The chocolate flavor regular ice cream by Stone Ridge had plenty of flavor but a thinner body. We felt that the light vanilla was actually creamier and smoother than the regular chocolate.

Despite these shortcomings, the family and I were pleased overall with Stone Ridge's two most basic flavors and we would certainly buy them again.

You should be able to find Stone Ridge Creamery ice cream just about anywhere in the US, since it's a SuperValu brand and they operate retail grocery chains across the country. Click here for a list of SuperValu-owned chains - from there you can find short descriptions and capsule histories of the various stores.

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Dollar Store Nightmares: Fake Sour Cream

By now, I really shouldn't be surprised at some of the crap I find when I'm bottom-feeding at the local dollar store. But this really wins the prize: a chemical soup masquerading as "Sourcreme." (Love the label: Unreal!!! Why would anyone be proud of that?)

I really don't get it. Not even the dollar price tag can make this slop appeal to me - especially since anyone can get real sour cream at the supermarket on sale for about a dollar (and it's usually a dollar all the time at some of the discount supermarkets like Price/Rite or Sav-A-Lot.) Just about any argument anyone can make in favor of buying this can be refuted:

• It's not cheaper - As I've already pointed out, the same quantity of real sour cream can be had at the discount supermarkets. In fact, Price/Rite usually carries Axelrod or Friendship - both brands which have no added thickeners or gums - just cream, milk, and culture.

• It's not non-dairy for the lactose intolerant - there's whey protein concentrate and nonfat dry milk in it.

• It's not lower in fat - in fact, a greater percentage of this slop's calories come from fat than in real sour cream.

This kind of thing makes me wonder if allowing dollar stores to have refrigerated sections is a good idea at all.

Would You Give Your Kids Mighty Milk?

It's always a blast to shop at places like Big Lots. Sometimes, I find discontinued items that were pretty good, and I get a last chance to stock up on them. Other times, I come across interesting but unknown items that might have been too expensive to buy in the regular store, but as a cut-rate job lot item they're not only affordable, but make a good lunch too. and sometimes, I just buy stuff for the lulz - bizarre or strange crap that I eat and write about just for laughs and because it's kind of a hobby.

Occasionally, though, I find something like Mighty Milk - it looks weird enough to be interesting, but turns out to be wretched.

Mighty Milk is sold in a brick-like four-pack of 8.5-ounce Tetra Pak containers. Each container includes a telescoping straw, but consumers may also peel off the foil seal and pour out the drink if they prefer.

I imagine what most people will prefer is to pour this swill out into the toilet.

For one thing, even though this stuff has almost nothing in common with any actual dairy product, there is nothing on the front label to indicate that Mighty Milk is anything other than some kind of flavored milk. The entire front label reads: Mighty Milk Nutritional Drink for Kids - Chocolate Shake. Sounds like some kind of fortified milk drink. The four-pack is designed so that the front label of the individual Tetra Paks face outward. Only after buying the product and reading the fine print is there any indication of the purely industrial nature of the fluid within:

Water, Caseinate, Milk Protein Isolate, Blend of Vegetable Oils (Sunflower and/or Safflower Oil, Canola Oil), Crystalline Fructose, Lecinthinated Cocoa, Maltodextrin, Vitamin Mineral Blend, MCT's, Natural and Artificial Flavors, Whey, Potassium Chloride, Soy Lecithin, Microcrystalline Cellulose, Monosodium Phosphate, Carrageenan, Sodium Hexametaphosphate, Salt, Acesulphame Potassium, Sucralose.

Wow. That's like a shopping list for the Monsanto Factory Outlet.

At the bottom of the container is the allergen warning. If I had seen this first, I might not have bothered buying it. Check it out:

ALLERGEN STATEMENT: This product contains ingredients derived from milk and soy. However this product contains no milk.

"Contains no milk." That's kind of an important detail. Why isn't it on the front label?

The package instructions say that it's "Best Served Cold" and "Shake Well Before Using." So I put the four-pack in the fridge overnight before trying some the next day. When I got ready to try it, I gave it a good shake and popped the straw through the foil.

Holy shit, this stuff is nasty. It tasted like a mixture of chocolate water, oily liquid vitamins, and rusty steel. There was a strange sort of "tingling" sensation in my mouth when I drank it that I can't really pin down or accurately describe. As I drank more from the container, it became harder to draw anything through the straw though it was obvious that there was still something in there.

I tipped the container over a cup and gave it a squeeze...and thick, gooey blobs dropped out. Clearly, just giving this stuff a shake doesn't do any good. It was disgusting.

I tried again with a new container of Mighty Milk. I gave it a thorough shake and poured it into a different cup. Just like the first time, the "Nutritional Drink" came out in a chunky flow of thin brown liquid and thick gluey clumps. I tried to stir it with a spoon, but it didn't really matter how hard or how fast I stirred, the chunks were still there - and no amount of stirring made it taste any better.

According to the Mighty Milk website, it comes in several varieties, including Root Beer Float, Go Bananas, and a couple of others. If chocolate (notorious for it's ability to cover other flavors) can't make this medicinal concoction taste palatable, I can't imagine how bad the others are.

Link:
Mighty Foodz (Yes, they really do spell it like that.)

The video below is what Mighty Milk looks like when it's plopping from the container to the cup. There's no audio, but I bet with a little imagination you can provide the proper soundtrack.

Greek Yogurt CAGE MATCH!

My daughter Lynn has loved Greek-style yogurt for awhile now, ever since she discovered the Fage brand in a local natural-foods supermarket. Back then, it was the only Greek yogurt on the shelves, and Fage's US branch was an import business as they built brand identity among American consumers.

Fage has had enormous success here, and now makes yogurt for the US market in a shiny new facility in upstate New York - and along with their success has come competition. Lynn, along with my wife Maryanne, has tried other Greek yogurts - always coming back to Fage as her favorite. There are three widely-available Greek yogurts in our local supermarkets, so we decided to give them a head-to-head comparison test.

Note: This was not a "blind taste test" to determine which Greek yogurt is "best." This was a tasting to compare and contrast flavors and textures between the three, to explain why we like the ones we do, and to give you an idea of what to expect when you shop for a Greek yogurt.

To give a fair comparison, we needed identical types of yogurt. We chose plain non-fat (0% fat) yogurt for the tasting because that was the only style common to all three brands on the shelf at the supermarket.

Fage Total 0% - Thick, smooth, and rich-tasting despite being a fat-free yogurt, Fage's texture is almost pudding-like. It's very milky-tasting with a strong yogurt taste. Characteristically sharp but not overly acidic, Fage's Greek yogurt is an excellent choice for snacks with jam or fruit stirred in, and it's thick enough to use as a substitute for sour cream in dips or dressings. This was our favorite of the three.

Link:
Fage's American website.

Oikos Organic Greek Yogurt - Thinner than Fage, with a consistency much closer to regular yogurt. Mild-tasting with subtle sour milk notes, Oikos is a good choice if you enjoy more standard commercial yogurts but want something with a little more body. Blends well with flavored syrups and jams.

Careful attention to the Oikos label will reveal that it is made by Stonyfield Farm, a big name in the yogurt business. When I visited Oikos' website, I found that the yogurt is made "in partnership" with Euphrates Inc., a business specializing in feta cheese and Greek yogurt production which also makes Chobani Greek yogurt, the other brand in this test (more about Euphrates and Chobani in a moment.)

Links:
Oikos Organic Greek Yogurt website.
Stonyfield Farm website.

Chobani Greek Yogurt - Very thick but with a coarser texture than the Fage, this brand also had the sharpest taste of the three. Aggressive yogurt flavor with a pronounced vinegary sourness; Chobani practically begs to be mixed with something to cut it's overpowering acidity. Though it was my daughter's least favorite brand, my wife likes Chobani with a couple spoonfuls of fruit jam or honey stirred in.

Chobani's story is interesting - it's made by Agro-Farma Inc. in New York state. Although the name sounds like it belongs to a huge factory-farming conglomerate, it's actually a small company closely tied to Euphrates Inc., a large New York State maker of feta cheese which established itself as an important supplier of high-quality feta to the food-service industry before turning it's eye on the consumer market. Euphrates got it's start in 1998 when a third-generation European cheesemaker decided that it would be more advantageous to start operations in the US than to try to import his family's product into the country. In 2005, Euphrates purchased a former yogurt-processing plant from Kraft and began production of Greek yogurt there. Today, they produce Chobani Greek yogurt, and as related above, also make Oikos Organic Yogurt in partnership with Stonyfield Farms.

Links:
Chobani Greek Yogurt's website (this is also Agro-Farma's website.)
Euphrates Inc. website
Euphrates focuses on top-notch Feta - an article from the 17 March 2006 issue of Retail Watch, a digest for cheese marketers.

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Special thanks go to snackgirl, author of Second Rate Snacks, one of my new favorite blogs. I don't ordinarily do head-to-head comparisons of foods, but her format inspired me. Yogurt comparison was one of the suggestions in a comment on her blog and it seemed like a natural for my wife and daughter to help with because they each eat a dose of yogurt every single day. I hope that snackgirl takes the time to do a comparison also - I'd love to compare her impressions with ours. Now click on the link up there to her blog. You'll enjoy it (link will open in a new tab or window depending on your browser.)

Coffee Milk

Coffee milk. It's the official state drink of Rhode Island, a beverage found in diners and dairy cases from the Connecticut shoreline to Cape Cod, and chances are if you're not from New England, you've never heard of it.

Back in the 1930's, fountain operators and restaurant owners were concocting new drinks to lure customers. Somewhere in Rhode Island, a creative diner owner made up a batch of syrup by cooking leftover coffee grounds with sugar. He stirred the syrup into a glass of milk, and Coffee Milk was born.

By the 1940's, demand for coffee milk was great enough that there were two companies manufacturing the syrup: Eclipse and Autocrat (their rivalry ended in 1991 when the Eclipse brand and formula was purchased by Autocrat. Both labels are still available in stores, but both are today produced by Autocrat Inc.)

Over the past twenty years or so, coffee milk's popularity has spread. Once available only in Rhode Island, it can now be found throughout New England - commonly in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and the South Shore of Massachusetts, but I've found ready-to-drink versions as far north as Portland Maine. Trinity Farm, the dairy in my hometown, bottles an excellent version and sells it in their dairy store.

Coffee syrup all by itself, undiluted by milk, tastes a little strange. It is very similar in flavor to molassess but with a rounder, less harsh "edge" to it. It doesn't remind me of coffee at all! The coffee flavor comes out when the syrup is mixed with milk. Autocrat's taste is smooth, on the gentle side, and sweet with almost no coffee bitterness. Trinity's ready-to-drink coffee milk has more coffee assertiveness, and a short but pronounced bitter finish reminiscent of cappuccino.

Ready-to-drink coffee milk can also be found right alongside the chocolate- and strawberry-flavored varieties in convenience store dairy cases throughout the region. Garelick Farms (originally of Franklin, Massachusetts) coffee-flavored Milk Chugs are sweet and mild and available at just about any market selling other Garelick products, and H P Hood also produces a very good ready-to-drink low-fat (1% milkfat) coffee milk product. Both companies originated in New England and are huge players in the dairy industry here; other dairy companies that produce flavored milks (Land-O-Lakes, NesQuik, and Turkey Hill, for example) sell their products here but can't be bothered to go after the relatively small coffee milk niche.

Links:

Autocrat Inc. - Makers of premium coffee and syrup since 1895.

Nutritional info for Garelick Farms Colossal Coffee Milk Chug

Nutritional info for H P Hood Coffee milk

Local Food: Collins Creamery Ice Cream

In the 1990's, with bulk milk prices falling, two dairies in Enfield Connecticut took very different approaches to adapting to the new market. Trinity Farms, on Oliver Road near Interstate 91, started processing and selling their milk directly to the public at their dairy and has developed a loyal area following with their high-quality milks and creams, yogurts, and butter.

Powder Hill Farms, owned by the Collins family and located on the other side of town, went in a different direction. In 1997, they opened The Collins Creamery to sell ice cream made on the premises from dairy's own milk. It was a huge success and has not only helped the farm to prosper, it has helped the family raise public awareness of local agriculture. The farm welcomes tour groups and school field trips for a nominal fee, which includes a one-hour tour of the farm followed by ice cream at the Creamery.

The sign at the Creamery says "On the quiet side of town," and there's no doubt; located on Powder Hill Road in Enfield, the farm is surrounded by pastures, cornfields, and tobacco fields. It's off the beaten track to be sure, but the ice cream is well worth the extra few minutes it takes to drive there. They make over 20 flavors, ranging from the simple and delicious vanilla and chocolate, to more complex delights like red raspberry chocolate chip.

Hard ice cream is their specialty, but they do have a softserve machine if that's what you're after, and they'll hand-pack any ice cream flavor you desire into pints, quarts, or half-gallons to bring home.

On a warm and sticky summer evening, there's nothing like pulling into the parking lot at the Creamery and getting a cone or a dish of ice cream to take the edge off the sultry weather. The ice cream stand is near one of the old red barns, and part of the parking area borders a small pasture. Sometimes, a few of the cows are behind the stout wooden rail fence, and they'll come over to the fence to have their heads scratched, eat a handful of clover from your hand, or give you a friendly lick.

The Collins Creamery is pet-friendly, too. Well-behaved dogs (on leashes, please) are welcomed, and one of the items on the menu is the "Doggie Dish," a small portion of vanilla soft-serve ice cream in a cup, topped with a small dog biscuit.

The Collins Creamery
9 Powder Hill Road
Enfield CT 06082
860.749.8663

Links:

The Collins Creamery Website

Smyth's Trinity Farm, Enfield CT

I write a lot about fast food, bizarre snacks, and mass-market processed junk, but when it comes right down to it, my family and I eat most of our meals at home and buy very little processed crap from the "center of the supermarket." In fact, we source as much of our food as possible from local producers; what we can't find locally we try to find regionally. Hey, if we can't keep our money in the local economy we can at least attempt to keep it in New England.

A great example of this is Smyth's Trinity Farm, a small local dairy in Enfield, Connecticut, just a few minutes' drive from my home. Mike Smyth and his wife Dale have one of the last working dairies in a town where the cows once outnumbered the people, and we've been buying our milk there exclusively for the past ten or twelve years.

Their dairy herd is pastured on 25 acres of land sandwiched between Interstate 91 and US Route 5 just south of the Massachusetts/Connecticut state line, and the milk those cows produce is processed, bottled, and sold right there at the dairy. They use traditional, pay-a-deposit-and-bring-it-back glass bottles (capped with plastic caps these days - a few years ago their supplier stopped making paper caps, citing low demand.) And although the Smyth's don't make a big deal about it, there isn't anything "unnatural" in their milk. They don't use growth hormones or tons of antibiotics and they don't treat their small herd like four-legged milk factories. The girls are well treated and lovingly cared for, and on many days you can see them when you drive up to buy milk - the salesroom is in the front of the barn and the overhead door is kept wide open on nice days.

Unless you're milking your own cow, this is about as personally acquainted as you can get with your milk supply. And if you're interested in the actual path your milk takes as it gets from moo to you, the Smyths hold Open House Saturdays a few times a year, giving tours of the processing and bottling operations and giving tastes of the milk, yogurt, cream, and butter they produce there.

Now, a small operation is expensive to run, and the milk does cost somewhat more here than at the supermarket. But we're willing to pay the premium for several reasons:

• Trinity Farm's milk can't be fairly compared to big-brand mass-produced milk, which is blended using milks from hundreds of dairies in order to obtain a consistent and "lowest-common-denominator" taste. Single-dairy milk has a distinctive flavor - a certain uniqueness due to location, pasturing, etc. It's like comparing blended Scotch whiskey to the single-malts that go into it.
  
• This flavor difference really stands out when comparing like products. "Whole milk" in the supermarket contains 4% milkfat, and "low fat" milk can have 2% or 1% milkfat. Trinity's fattiest milk is their 3%, which - although lower in fat than supermarket whole milk - has a richer taste and a better flavor. Even their skim milk is better tasting than the nasty thin skim milk in the supermarket dairy case.
• Trinity's heavy cream and half-and-half are amazing - rich and flavorful, and completely lacking in the gums, extenders, and additives very often found in national brands.
• Mike and Dale Smyth know many of their customers by name. How many of H P Hood's customers do you think the CEO of Hood chats with at the dairy?
  
• Buying milk at the dairy not only keeps my money in the local economy, it helps ensure the future of one of the last family-run farms in my town. The Smyth's kids - adults with kids of their own now - work the farm along with their parents, and are determined to keep the farm viable and operating in the years ahead.
  

Chances are that there's a working dairy near you, too. They may not sell their entire output directly to consumers (many make ends meet by contributing to co-ops) but they might set up at farmers markets in your area. You owe it to yourself to check it out.

Smyth's Trinity Farm
4 Oliver Road
Enfield CT 06082
860.745.0751

Relevant link:

Smith Family Proud of Farming Tradition, from the Springfield MA Republican, 21 May 2008

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