Chobani Yogurts : Review and Recipes

If you follow any London-based fitness bloggers you may have read about a BOOM! Cycle event that was held recently. I was unfortunately unable to go but the lovely Chobani people, who were providing post-workout refreshments in the form of smoothies, offered to send me some of their lovely strained yogurts to try anyway. Chobani are a US company who are starting to get popular over here. Their 170g single serve pots contain around 14g of protein and are made with only naturally sourced ingredients. They have seen it becoming popular with the fitness community as a pre and post workout fuel. 

I returned from holiday to a cool-box full of yogurt: a huge pot of plain and 6 single serving fruit-on-the-bottom pots in blueberry, passion fruit, cherry and pomegranate flavours.

Mostly I ate the single serve pots for breakfast. At 170g they are substantial enough to have as a breakfast, particularly if you don't want to workout on an empty stomach but want something good. I didn't try them specifically pre or post workouts but I did find them quite filling. The first one I tried was the passion fruit, which I had unadulterated for breakfast. It was lovely and thick, but I expected more fruit on the bottom. In fact all the flavours were lovely and my favourites were probably the cherry, which I had as a snack, and the blueberry which I had plain and with added apple puree for breakfast.

The real star for me, though, was the plain yogurt. I started out using a little of it to cool down a curry and then for breakfast with granola and apple puree which kept me full until lunch (unusual). The plain seemed even thicker than the fruit versions and smelt slightly like cottage cheese but lends itself very well to being used as an ingredient. I got tipped off by the chobani twitter feed that you could use equal parts yogurt and self raising flour to make pizza bases so as someone who gets easily phased by the idea of making anything bread-like, I felt compelled to give this a try.

I'm not one to worry about my pizza being the right shape...

I mixed 1/2 cup plain chobani and 1/2 cup self raising flour in a bowl until it started to come together, then turned it out onto a floured surface to knead it for a couple of minutes. After rolling it to what seemed like an appropriate thickness I put it on a baking sheet I added my toppings. I use some home-made arrabiatta sauce as my tomato base and topped this with roasted peppers from a jar, dried italian herbs, pitted black olives and some "pizza cheese" from the freezer. You really couldn't make this any easier. Into the oven at 180 degrees for about 15 minutes and dinner was served! I managed to restrain myself to eating only half the pizza, saving the rest for lunch the following day.

Pizza doesn't get any easier than this

I still had a little plain chobani left so I decided to make a coleslaw to supplement my left overs. A grated carrot, a grated golden beetroot, a sliced shallot, 2 sliced chinese cabbage leaves and 1 sliced pointed green cabbage leaf joined about 2 tbsp of  chobani in a bowl with a little olive oil, lemon juice and 2 tsp of wholegrain mustard for a good mixing. A really delicious autumn coleslaw!

Autumn coleslaw and pizza leftovers

Although I did enjoy all the yogurts, I probably wouldn't choose Chobani over other fruit-on-the-bottom yogurts but I would definitely get the plain yogurt again for using as an ingredient. The chobani website have some great recipe ideas. Chobani are being stocked in more supermarkets across the UK including Morrisons and are currently 89p for the 170g pots in Tesco's.

Disclaimer: I was sent the Chobani free of charge to try in return for a review but all opinions are my own.