bntowen's Full Review: Fage Total Greek Yogurt, (500g) 17.6oz (Fage)
In the big city of Asheville, North Carolina, there is an organic item overrun store named, Amazing Savings. The earthy clientele might have been better served by store names like, "Cheap, Green & Crunchy" or "Petchouli & Dreds", but the cliched yet understated Amazing Savings name is truly...amazing. This glorified loading dock of a store warehouses everything organic from fruit loops to loose chai tea. One $350 four-bag outing with my sister at this store's full-priced parent company Earthfare lead this tight wadded second generation Lebanese American to audibly shout, "This place is amazing!" with 30-80% off retail prices. Sure 10% of the items or less had expiration dates that coincided with Keith Richards date of birth, but that happens at all stores including the high-end organic "Dinner for the Rich" a.k.a. Earthfare (very similar to the nationwide chain "Whole Foods").
It was months ago now I delved into their most amazing grocery section, "dairy". Inside those refurbished 1980's side-by-side-by-side glass doors was organic milk, eggs, cheese, even dare I say meat? Not meat slaughtered in antibiotic-filled animal death camps, but in organic "expiration centers" where animals, who were never yelled at, willingly gave up their uber-kosher lives with Shaman-like peace. Also within the silvery cases were shelves upon shelves of yogurt. Yes, in my indomitable ADHD writing-style I reached this article's topic. I saw and gleefully purchased tub after tub of Fage yogurt. I cannot type further without writing that this well within the date 17.6oz 2% Fage plain and honey yogurt was $1.49 per tub instead of the nearly $5.00 at "Earthfare". What is a Lebanese grocery trip without bragging about the deal? The deal is the deal.
About the yogurt. Hang on. Let me see, where I put my Adderall XR. Okay, I'll need to stop typing to for a second (audible gulp) there. Now, it'll take a few minutes before I'm completely on-topic, but really this has to do with Fage. It's more about the Greek vs. Lebanese thing. In short, they conquered our region about a few thousand years ago, took our food, took our women, left behind the big noses, renamed the food as their own, including, (medication on board talkin' now) Lebneh a.k.a. Fage or the regurgitating English misnomer, yogurt.
You wanna talk culture? They're live and active of the They store our culture and put it in their yogurt. You wanna talk strained yogurt. That was us. My mother made yogurt with a gallon of whole milk strained into mass of tangy cream that was deplorable to me as a child and is now sought after and packaged in very similar form by Fage (mom had to add cultures due to pasteurization where Fage's Total Greek yogurt starts with organic or non-hormonally treated raw milk and raw cream as natural cultures can thrive in a non-pasteurized environment). Scrambling home with four tubs, 2 regular and two honey, I sampled both. Here's the tale of the tongue.
The creamy consistency sets slightly grainy on the tongue that wonderfully differentiates it from sour cream (sour cream differs from yogurt in that sour cream is made from cream with different bacteria than yogurt made from milk. However, this and other Greek-style yogurts are made with a blend of cream and milk.) I have a sour creamy competitor in my fridge called, Chobani, and it sits on and coats your tongue like Glidden's Premium Semi-gloss (Colonial White). Fage has a balance of creamy to sour that brings a homemade flavor into a mass merchandised product. Get this. There is very little aftertaste. My experience with the honey flavor exceeded that of the plain.
I cook, taste, and from the looks of my mid-section, eat a lot of that food. To effectively cook, one must anticipate/visualize-on-the-palette flavor combinations before launching the creation. I thought I fully anticipated what Fage's Honey flavored yogurt would taste like. (Note: it's real honey, not high fructose corn syrup) My limbic-hippocampal-hypotalamic-thalamic taste centers anticipated sweetish-creamy-but-no-better-than-Dannonesque flavor. The first amazing ingestion left me mentally blank except for one puzzling thought. I had to actually swallow and taste it a second time because I thought, "There's no way that was better than ice cream." The emotionally damaged skeptic will assume I'm a Grecian Fage hack cleverly renamed "Nick" in the pocket of Big Yogurt. Do you know what it feels like to admit that the Greeks made better yogurt?..only in this flavour of course because the plain was a tie and not a loss!
The honey flavored 17.6oz Fage was a rich flavor with caramel-honey tones that left cleanly from the mouth without the aforementioned Glidden one-coat. I tried adding my own sourwood honey to the plain to replicate the honey because six other members of my family hoovered it up. I couldn't quite attain the delicate mix. Now back to the plain whoch by the way is high in fat but also high in protein realtive to other yogurts (I know yogurt for some has an "h" in it but I just can't bring myself to using it so I got the "h" outta there) aren't as concentrated.
Fage's Total Greek Plain Yogurt can replace sour cream. After adding a touch of salt, I used this yogurt in creamy ranch dressing, gravy, and in southern biscuits imitating the buttermilk flavor and fluffing power (culinary term from the Greek, Flovos taken from the Arabic, Flaceh (WARNING: do not attempt this throaty Arabic sound in a kitchen). Fresh blueberries and maple syrup over pancakes (suspend your Flaceh response and try it) were surprisingly better than whip cream.
The company's creative website is fun to go over with the kids as there are production graphics of milk trucks filling tanks. Embedded in the company's history is their anti-Madison Avenue, slogan that anyone's parents remotely close to the Mediterranean would have come up with, ""We would never make a product that we would not give to our children." The voiceover for that slogan needs to be an eighty-five-year-old Greek woman.
Since most national brand yogurts are $3 to $4 dollars, and more for organic, Fage offers maximum eatability, versatility, and quality for even the $4 to $5 price rage. The only drawback is the parchment paper over the top. I know what it's for. Mom put wax paper on top of hers after straining. But on-the-go distracted Americans and Greeks for that matter do what I did and submerge the parchment disc deep into the tub only to pull out half the contents in an attempt to rectify the mistake. If you live alone, you could just lick off the yogurt blob but ask yourself something, "Is that why you live alone?" How about the Greek flag across the front. Who but an angry Ottoman would drive through the symbol and not remove the paper before spooning?
Made from skimmed cows milk Thick and creamy plain yogurt Add up natural, fresh or frozen fruits as you like it Also replaces sour creamMore at Amazon Marketplace
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