Raspberry yogurts

Figuring out what’s going to happen with AI is a lot. It’s Sunday. Let’s try to figure out something easier.

What is the best raspberry yogurt?

No, still too ambitious. What are different raspberry yogurts like?

Probably still too ambitious. What is anything like? What is experience? How is it different to know every fact about raspberry yogurt and to know what raspberry yogurt is like?

Ok, setting that aside, what are different raspberry yogurts like?

I have employed the methodology of buying the five things that seemed closest to ‘raspberry yogurt’ from a grocery store—accepting ‘hibiscus raspberry’ but not fermented oats or coconuts as forms of ‘yogurt’ (sorry vegans, but realistically you aren’t interested in comparing the tastes and mouth feels of ethical and unethical substances)—then leaving them in my fridge for a while while I worked on other things.

I took them out for this investigation, then got distracted by a two-hour conversation about the nature of class with my housemate, so they are not so cold now. I’m just going to accept that that is what yogurt is like sometimes in a world where I’m unwilling to devote much more effort to yogurt optimality, and proceed.

What these yogurts are like

Raspberry Noosa: plastic lid openable, tin foil under-lid not that pleasing to pull off. Looks a bit separated, like a fine cream over raspberry jam in milky water. Some of the creamy bit is white but some is pink - I wonder how that happens. The package says ‘finest yogurt’, nicely ambiguous between ‘most high quality yogurt’ and ‘least granular yogurt’, and ambiguous about whether they are saying that Noosa yogurt is the finest of yogurts, or this yogurt is the finest on a spectrum of how fine they could make yogurt, or this is the finest of the Noosa yogurts. I guess they could also be saying this yogurt is the most okay. I appreciate their apparent effort to suggest their yogurt is the best while avoiding outright lying, unlike so many food sellers.

The yogurt does seem fine in texture, maybe a little thin, and with raspberry seeds in the raspberry portion. At first bite, that part tasted like raspberry jam, but in further bites it is hard to get the real raspberry jam flavor so much as a weaker, wetter general berry-like slurry flavor. The yogurt is reasonably sour, and not too sweet, contrary to my assumptions. Though is some of the bite actually sweetness? Man, experiencing things conclusively is hard. I might come back to it after other ones. It’s tempting to keep eating, but not like ‘wow’.

Coming back later, I note that the raspberry section is quite non-homogeneous, like a thick liquid which smeared across the yogurt is full of organic membranes and fleshy strands. After tasting Yoplait, I appreciate more the yogurt here, which indeed has something good about the fineness, like eating good linen.

Yoplait Original Red Raspberry: tinfoil slightly annoying to pull off, only one lid, strange container with wider base than top. Immediate smell is different from Noosa but familiar, not like raspberry jam—I’d say like raspberry candy or raspberry medicine, though that sounds too rude. The substance is a thoroughly mixed pink goop with a tiny bit of separation, and more of a blobby sheen. Taste is also unlike raspberry jam. Sweet with a little tartness. Substance feels a bit thin and like slightly gelatinous and less wholesome than Noosa. Also less tart.

Brown Cow Cream Top Whole Milk Yogurt Raspberry on the Bottom: more standard container with foil on top, easier to remove due to enough foil to grip and not too firmly glued on. Looks like set yellowish off-white cream with water sitting in the cracks. Cream top is only a few millimeters thick and doesn’t feel very creamy to eat. It’s surprisingly hard to say what it is like. Yogurt below has a watery collapsing structure that feels troubling, like I expect it to not be salty enough, or pointed enough somehow. A bland bloated watery coagulation. The raspberry part is also like a watery structured substance, and tastes like neither Noosa nor Yoplait. It tastes less clearly like anything except vague sweet fruit, but nice enough. Not tart enough for me overall. If you mix the cream top with the lower parts, it improves the texture some—I guess the lower parts are a bit like anti-cream yogurt. I keep wanting to describe this quality better—some kind of wet emptiness that feels a bit wrong to consume, like how not having enough salt has its own unpleasant hard to eat quality, rather than just being a lack of something good. This thing I’m pointing to seems common to some degree in the yogurts.

Chobani Greek Yogurt Raspberry on the Bottom: foil top a bit hard to pull off. Licking the bottom is somehow a little nauseating. Tart but in more of a personal way, like, ‘TMI yogurt—just because I’m eating you I didn’t want it to feel so visceral’. So that’s weird. Bits on top and stuck to the lid are very white like snow, with the same mild pink tinge in places. Appears like a solidish rotatable blancmange stably sitting in a thin edge of liquid, with firmer bits around the top. Texture is reminiscent of something that is set because it’s curdled - that kind of fracturing firm dairy in a watery background. This is related to the watery quality mentioned above. The raspberry also has a related bloated watery appearance. I had thought Greek yogurt was sourer, but this doesn’t seem that sour. It has some kind of bite, but I think from the jam, and somewhat sweetness. There is another background flavor not in the other yogurts, but I don’t know what it is - a kind of familiar, kind of pleasant, non-food-but-not-dangerous, like cardboard you used to chew in a much earlier period of life. Again, the sense of too-personal, and this time I identify it as coming from an acidic organic flavor slightly reminiscent of vomit. (I find several popular foods slightly reminiscent of vomit, so this isn’t a hard criticism.) Though crunching a raspberry seed also reminded me of mold, which is weirder. I bet I’m imagining things there. Overall, I may have eaten too much yogurt at this point, but am offput by that watery structure I’m having trouble describing. I think it’s a bit reminiscent of the gelatinous material inside nappies, when wet, but that still isn’t right.

La Fermiére Naturally FrenchTM Hibiscus Raspberry Creamy Whole Milk Yogurt: this yogurt may be at a disadvantage because I’m feeling a bit overyogurted. That watery empty thing doesn’t sit in my stomach so well. This yogurt has a fancy paper band around it, which tears open nicely. Gold-topped glass jar feels special, though perhaps also resource intensive. Foil has tiny dimples in it, and two of them have stains growing from them that suggest to me they are fully poked through. I don’t like that. But two rather than one suggests this is at least common, so probably doesn’t lead to purchasers dying or someone would have noticed.

Too well glued, hard to open. Hmm, holding it up to the light, what looked like a stain seems to be a gap where the metal of the lid has disintegrated or something, and there is a dimple in the yogurt coating the metal too, suggesting there really is a hole in the lid. Is this intentional? The internet barely mentions this phenomenon, but Google’s AI tells me there are intentional tiny holes in yogurt lids to release pressure, interspersed with telling me that any holes in yogurt lids are unintentional and the yogurt should be thrown away. It tells me they are called breather or venting holes, but I find no other mention of this on the internet. I want to just give up and eat the yogurt, but the lid does look so questionable. I give up on the yogurt. Yogurt with a side of annoying internet research, questioning one’s judgment processes and no yogurt: zero stars. Alas, I was hopeful for this one.

Summary

In the end, Noosa is the one I’m most inclined to eat more, but there was a general lack of creamy richness or satisfying raspberry flavor of the kind one gets in raspberry jam, or raspberries. Maybe what I believed raspberry yogurt should be like is creme fraiche with raspberry jam, except less sweet and rich. But maybe there isn’t a point on the sweetness and richness scale that satisfies ‘reasonably healthy’ while still having much of what would be good about that.

There was a lot of this kind of unsatisfying quality that I found hard to describe—like bloated watery chunky pudding—and which I hadn’t properly noticed was rife in yogurt.

Last minute entrant: an open tub of Trader Joe’s European Style Organic Plain Yogurt I found in the fridge when putting away the above yogurts + Bonne Maman Raspberry Preserve: This yogurt is nothing like the watery thing. It feels substantive and creamy and properly tart. If you told me it was lemon flavored, I might have believed you. It doesn’t actually go with the raspberry jam particularly well—perhaps the tartness fails to meld with the sweet tartness of the jam. The jam is also actually a tiny bit chewy. But both of them are delicious, so the overall experience is still probably better than any above. I ate it all, carefully scraping up slivers of silky rich yogurt, before I had time to properly contemplate what the jam was like.

I infer that you can have fairly satisfying yogurt without it being creme fraiche. Can you have satisfying raspberry accompaniment without it being jam? I guess yes based on the existence and nature of raspberry soup, but that’s research for another time.

Final summary

It’s interesting the extent to which I wasn’t already aware of the nature of raspberry yogurt, as an occasional raspberry yogurt eater.