BONUS: Half-and-half: 3.5/5. Half-and-half
is 50% whole milk and 50% cream. It's used as coffee creamer. It just tastes like a thick and heavy milk. Not bad at all
but it might've made me sick, I dunno.
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Milk ratings
Yogurt ratings
For milk: the best kind of milk is UNDENIABLY WHOLE MILK. It's sold in the red cartons. After trying it, you'll never want any other kind of milk. Whole milk has all the tasty fats in it. Maybe it's unhealthy but who cares. All the other milks are just reduced-fat versions of the OG and are not as good because they take out all the tasty fats. If you care AT ALL about how good milk tastes, get WHOLE MILK!!!
For those that continue to bicker about 2% vs 1% milk or something, it's all meaningless compared to whole milk. But just in case, here's my personal milk ratings:
BONUS: Half-and-half: 3.5/5. Half-and-half
is 50% whole milk and 50% cream. It's used as coffee creamer. It just tastes like a thick and heavy milk. Not bad at all
but it might've made me sick, I dunno.
Yogurt is an AMAZING food. When I was a kid I liked the (probably overpriced) little cups of Yoplait yogurt in all the silly flavors like key lime pie and orange popsicle. They're a gateway drug. Eventually when you get older you realize that your parents don't buying a whole ton of them even when you go through like 3 of them a day. So then you have like 2 options to get more yogurt and have it be more reliably available to you in the fridge:
At first, none of these are as tasty as the Yoplait yogurts that might as well be candy. But in terms of being actual food, they're a bit better, so it's okay. Plain yogurt was still disgusting to me at the time, so I went for the first 2 options, and they became staples of my diet. This was good for a while, until:
Turkey and salted plain yogurtDeep into my fruited-greek-yogurt phase, someone from Turkey suggested that I try salted plain yogurt since that's some kind of good dish over there. (it might be called ayran idk). It sounded terrible but I wanted to try it. So I got some plain yogurt that my dad bought and put salt in it.
But I put too much and it was literally inedible. Couldn't taste the sourness, which I thought was good at the time, but there was TOO MUCH SALT. So I stirred in more yogurt to try and dilute the salt. it took A LOT OF YOGURT. And I kept tasting it the whole time. And then there was too much yogurt so I added more salt. Too salty. Add more yogurt. Add more salt. Add more yogurt.
This went on for like half an hour. In the end I'd eaten half a tub of plain yogurt (with no fruits or anything, only *too much* salt added into it). Why did I eat so much? I didn't wanna waste yogurt. I love yogurt. Something about this event though made me realize that plain yogurt is actually amazing.
In the end I realized that what I was searching for the whole time was plain yogurt. Whose only ingredients are milk and bacteria to ferment it. Fruit, sugar, corn syrup, guar gum, etc are only fillers that distract you from the actual yogurt. The yogurt is the good part. You don't wanna mask it with anything. Plain yogurt has 'plain' in the name, but the variety of plain yogurts out there is anything but bland. Some are sweet, some are tangy, some are sour, some are thin, some are thick. Some taste like cheese. Every brand is different even though it's all the same "plain" yogurt. But there is one thing to note: plain GREEK yogurt is the best.
I don't care if Greek yogurt isn't actually made in Greece. It's really really really really good. Also, your family probably won't eat very much plain yogurt, so you won't have to worry about them eating it all. If you like yogurt, you need to like plain greek yogurt. It is to other yogurts what whole milk is to other milks.
Homemade yogurt has been better than all the store-bought branded yogurt. Too few people seem to realize how easy yogurt is to make: it's just milk, yogurt, and heat. Yogurt is just fermented milk. Bacteria in the milk converts sugars into lactic acid(?) or something (which I guess makes it sour) and whatnot which is why it's yogurt. Store-bought probiotic yogurt has the microbes you need to make your own yogurt. Just add some heat to help the bacteria stuff grow and boom yogurt.
You can buy a yogurt maker for under $50. It's a small appliance that just keeps milk warm enough for the bacteria to colonize it and turn it into yogurt. If you don't want a yogurt machine you can probably do it on your stove. As for the store-bought yogurt you wanna use to "seed" your homemade yogurt, you want one with live and active cultures, and it should be plain. Here's a recipe you can try.
Apparently the difference between greek and plain yogurts is that greek yogurt is strained, making it thicker. Yummy.
Rating yogurt is hard because there's a lot of different kinds of yogurt. It's probably also a lot more subjective than whole milk vs non-whole milk. What I want to give the most attention to is the different brands of plain greek whole milk yogurt. (I'm not sure if whole milk yogurt is better than nonfat yogurt, which is more widespread, but homemade yogurt made from whole milk is much more delicious than when made from 2% milk, which makes it way too runny). Anyways I'll try.
Price: $3.47 / 2lb
Rating: 4/5
Since this is a walmart store brand, I initially had low hopes for this. But it's still really good. At first it's tangy. More tangy than sour I think. It's kind of like a cheesy tang. But it tastes great. The consistency is really good too; there's no lumpiness and it's nice and smooth. You can't go wrong with it despite it being a walmart store brand. If I could only eat this for the rest of my life I'd be happy.
I'll update this list as I eat more brands of plain yogurt. I've had other brands obviously, but I wanna rate them right after I just ate them.
Again these are more like desserts than yogurts. But still pretty good and maybe a decent value. I'll rate the different flavors I've tried; note that these ratings are only relative to the other yoplait yogurts, not comparable to the ratings of plain yogurt on here.
...I've never really had them. The few times in elementary school I did, they were usually half-frozen and the texture was too strange to really enjoy eating. Pretty sure they're just kinda overpriced lunchbox filler.