Currently cooking out of Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams at Home by Jeni Britton Bauer

In the past six months or so, we’ve had several of those serve-yourself frozen yogurt and toppings places open up in our town, and Bryan and I have become regular customers. It’s become our reward for working out at the gym. We run for an hour on the treadmill, then we eat pizza and frozen yogurt.

Quit judging me.

So you see, we are quite the connoisseurs when it comes to frozen yogurt (and packing as much frozen yogurt into a cup and still leaving room for toppings, but I digress). And this frozen yogurt is some of the best I’ve had. It’s creamy with a huge lemony punch. At first I wasn’t sure I’d like the blueberry swirl, but once the frozen yogurt set up in the freezer, it came together really well. My only complaint, and it is a small one, is that I left my blueberry sauce chunky, and those chunks froze into little pellets. But the flavor! Oh my. Just thinking about how it made my mouth pucker makes me want to run into the kitchen and make some more.

This recipe needs a little more advance preparation than most of the other recipes in the book. You start out by draining plain low-fat yogurt for 6-8 hours to thicken it. Could you just use Greek-style yogurt? I don’t know, but Bauer is pretty adamant about using plain, low-fat yogurt in all of her frozen yogurt recipes. While the yogurt is draining, you make a lemon syrup by  boiling lemon juice, lemon zest and sugar. Then you make a blueberry sauce by simmering blueberries and sugar together until the blueberries soften and burst. If you want a smooth sauce, you could puree the blueberries at this point. If you don’t mind some chunks, don’t.

Once the yogurt has drained and the syrups and sauces have cooled and chilled, you are ready to make the frozen yogurt base. The frozen yogurt base is pretty much the same as the ice cream base; milk, cream cheese, cream, corn syrup, sugar and a cornstarch slurry make a thickened liquid which is stirred into the drained yogurt. Then you add the lemon syrup, then chill and churn. As you are scooping the churned frozen yogurt into a container, you layer it with the chilled blueberry sauce. Let the whole thing freeze together, and you’ll find you don’t really need to leave the house to have good frozen yogurt.