Lemon Frozen Yogurt

Remember when I mentioned yesterday that we'd eaten frozen yogurt with our carrot cake? Well, surprise! (Or not-so-surprise, for the foreshadowing-detecting-savvy.) I figured that birthday cake without something vaguely ice cream-like is just shy of a travesty, especially when you've had an ice cream maker staring at you morosely from your cupboards all winter. As an added bonus, the lemony flavor matched the lemon zest in the cake's frosting.

Now, our ice cream maker is a little unusual – it's one of those Donvier ones (look at the picture of the blue one, that's it), where you don't use ice and salt and don't have to crank it like a maniac. Instead, you chill the magic, cylindrical metal container overnight; the next day, you pour in your would-be ice cream, and turn the funny handle on top once or twice every three minutes. (They say you're supposed to do it for twenty minutes, but it usually takes an hour.) I've got it on a long-term loan from my mother, because I'm the only one who's used it in the last six months (read: years).

Personally, I am fond of the ice cream makers you have to crank like a maniac. They bring back memories of Girl Scout Camp and slightly runny vanilla ice cream. (We had to crank in shifts.) But I'm not about to look a gift horse in the mouth – especially one that makes ice cream. And I can say that I have successfully made three or four batches of ice cream in it.

I'd never made frozen yogurt before, though, so I was a little skeptical about it working. The instruction booklet said you could do it, but since when do instruction booklets know anything?

You may laugh, but it turns out I was a little bit right in my skepticism, just for a different reason. You see, the ice cream maker worked too well. Upon contacting the bottom of the chilled cylinder, the yogurt mixture instantly froze, so that there was a solid block of frozen yogurt about two-inches deep on the bottom, and just enough climbing up the sides to make it impossible to turn the handle. This meant that for the next half-hour or so, I would get to systematically poke at the remainder of the frozen yogurt mixture, which was behaving as it was supposed to.

I don't know if our freezer is just possessed, and went above and beyond the call of duty when freezing the cylinder; or if maybe nonfat Greek yogurt has mystical freezing properties heretofore undiscovered. Whatever the case, we ended up with a thick, gorgeous layer of perfect frozen yogurt, and a bottom layer of ice-like crumbles that one could happily eat with an ice pick. It did taste good, though I was a little dissatisfied with the aftertaste, or afterfeeling, I suppose: the same one you get after drinking lemonade (and which is why I don't drink lemonade). Personally, I think it tasted better as unfrozen yogurt. I'm sure you could fix that by omitting the lemon juice, though, and increasing the amount of lemon zest.





LEMON FROZEN (GREEK) YOGURT
adapted from Food For My Family

Ingredients

3 cups Greek yogurt (nonfat, or whatever fat you like)
3/4 cup sugar
1 tablespoon lemon juice
2 tablespoons grated lemon zest
1 teaspoon vanilla extract


Directions

Mix together yogurt, sugar, lemon juice, lemon zest, and vanilla. Refrigerate for at least one hour. Freeze in an ice cream maker according to the manufacturer’s directions.

Makes approximately (6) 1/2-cup servings.