Chocolate Yogurt

Speaking of chocolate cravings I figured I post another use for cocoa powder- making your own chocolate yogurt. Stonyfield makes a Chococlate Underground flavor for 170 calories and something like 34 g of sugar. In my opinion, that's a lot of sugar. Plus stonyfield isn't always that um friendly on the wallet. I had just bought Unsweetened Cocao Powder from Trader Joe's and was eager to experiment with it. For 3 tbsps it's 110 cal, 7g of protein, 3 g of fat, and this is from memory but I think it had only 2 g of sugar.

Well, the first creation was my very own chocolate yogurt! I used a plain non-fat yogurt (80 cal), 2 splenda, and 1/2 tbsp of cocoa. That makes the total approx 100 calories. Let me just say that the cocoa powder worked well! It was really chocolate tasting. At first I didn't mix it well enough (see right- you can see the specks of cocoa) and it didn't exactly look all that appetizing ... but then I moved it to a bowl and mixed it better (see below)



It wasn't as thick as the stonyfield yogurt, but I suppose you could use greek yogurt for a very thick consistancy, or even a 1 or 2 % yogurt. But I thought this was a great substitute for the high sugar (and higher cal) chocolate yogurts that are in the market. It had a rich chocolate taste- was very real tasting, meaning you could tell it wasn't artificial. And it wasn't very sweet. If this isn't sweet enough for you, the powder tastes awesome with ff vanilla yogurt! Back to the plain yog version, I would have to say it tastes like a natural snack... like for some of these other creations you could give to anyone and they wouldn't expect it was healthy or diet or whatever, but this tastes like a dieter version of chcolate yogurt. In sum, I think it is quite tasty but you have to know not to expect some very rich decadent treat- it tastes like just like yogurt that is chocolate.

I plan on trying it with more cocoa (1 tbsp) to see how that tastes. Perhaps that will make it richer tasting. I'll keep you updated!



(And as an added bonus: you can then freeze this chocolate yogurt for a cold chocolate "fro-yo"!)