Almost indescribably good…
I’m on a road trip this holiday and we stop into a store to buy yogurt. That’s all we need for breakfast, we agree. Just yogurt (and coffee, obviously). This particular store has my favorite yogurt brand, Brown Cow, but it also has something else that I’ve never seen before:
Icelandic yogurt. Called Skyr (pronounced Skeer. I looked it up). From a chap (?) named Siggi. It’s in a tidy white container. Minimally designed.
Icelandic yogurt, I thought. That could be interesting. At the very least, it could be like ice cream.
So I bought one. Coconut flavor. (Insert Monty Python joke about a north-bound sparrow here.)
All jokes aside, however, this was some seriously delicious stuff.
Hard to describe though. Like full-fat Greek yogurt…but denser. Richer, somehow. I’ve been wracking my brain trying to come up with an analogous mouthfeel and I’m failing. Ice cream? Not really. Mashed potatoes? No. Sour cream? No. Tofu? No! No! No!
Which is to say, it’s rich and creamy and unlike anything else you’ve ever tasted. It was so good I ate most of our one container that morning before the chef even got out of the bathroom and I remembered I was supposed to share. Whoops.
My strange addiction
Yes, it’s pricier than yogurt, at $1.99 at Whole Foods. But then again it’s made by this one guy, Siggi Hilmarsson, and his small company in upstate New York, and they use hormone-free cows that roam grassy pastures on family farms yadda yadda yadda. All that good, right-on stuff.
And how cool is it that Skyr is actually a thousand-year-old Icelandic staple?
And if you care about such things, it’s not very fattening, considering how dense it is (it claims to have nearly 0% milk fat in some flavors), and, again depending on the flavor, one 5.3 oz. container is between 80 and 100 calories. Also, it employs very little sugar, and none of the artificial stuff.
Plus it packs a protein punch: 14% and higher per container. I don’t know about you, but that’s pretty much my perfect breakfast.
So far I’ve tried the coconut, the vanilla and the orange ginger. Loved them all. Partial to the vanilla (lovely, subtle flavor. And you can see tiny flecks of vanilla bean!)
The plain variety is 80 calories and 4 grams of sugar and dense enough to use in place of sour cream. For reals.
Three thumbs up for Siggi’s Skyr!
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks, going to Whole Foods this weekend. I just like saying Siggi’s Skyr. Is the texture similar to labneh?
Why yes it is! (and I just like saying “labneh…”