Very Berryful Frozen Yogurt

The 'big thing' in summery desserts these days seems to be frozen yogurt; chains are popping up right and left to take advantage of our society's warring desires to eat ice cream and yet be skinny. One of the chains near us advertises that their frozen yogurt "tastes great and looks great on you!"

I enjoy the faintly sweet tang of yogurt for its own sake, but generally, if I want ice cream, I want ice cream; it just seems silly to spend more money for a smaller container (if you buy it at the store), and if we go out to get ice cream, I'm not going to try to fool myself into thinking that I can eat more just because "yogurt" is healthier than "ice cream." It is still an absurd amount of dairy and sugar, and it's still going to require a good bit of exercise to balance it out.

That's not to say that I don't eat it - I just don't believe that it is all that much healthier. This belief was confirmed this morning when I was looking for a frozen yogurt recipe online, and was appalled by how much sugar they all called for. Sucrose, and corn syrup, and honey... all in the same recipe? This is supposed to be good for us? Unfortunately, I did actually need a yogurt recipe; we discovered this morning that the nearly 60 oz of yogurt in the fridge needed to be used by the end of this weekend, and there is only so much yogurt a person can eat in one day!  I normally purchase plain yogurt, but the other week there was an excellent sale on packs of all-natural blueberry and strawberry yogurt, and it seemed like it would be nice to have a change. Having flavored yogurt instead of plain now that it all needed to disappear quickly, though, added a bit to the challenge.

We eventually settled on frozen yogurt as the best way to use up a large portion of the berry-flavored yogurt at once. Every recipe I found, though, called for a discouraging amount of sugar. I'm sure they would have turned out well, but I didn't want to feel guilty for eating this, so eventually I gave up on looking through recipes and decided to come up with something myself. The end result certainly isn't as sweet as some commercial frozen yogurts, but it really preserved the yogurt-y flavor.

Berryful Frozen Yogurt

16 oz strawberry yogurt
16 oz blueberry yogurt
1 lb frozen mixed berries

Thaw the berries enough to break them up a bit with a potato masher (a stick blender might have helped, but we don't have one). Mix in the yogurt, combining thoroughly. Pour into ice cream maker and freeze according to your manufacturer's instructions. Ours took about 5 minutes shorter than ice cream would have to freeze, since the yogurt mixture is already thicker when it goes in, so keep an eye on it.