Sour Cream Replacement

I started eating Greek yogurt about a year or two ago, I guess when it really started showing up on the shelves in the supermarket. If you are unfamiliar, it is a thicker yogurt with more protein than normal yogurt (I do not consider candy bar yogurt like Yoplait yogurt to be real yogurt). Sometime after I started eating this stuff my girlfriend and I were in the market and a thought came to my mind, "I bet you could replace sour cream with plain Greek yogurt...". So we decided to give it a day in court.

We got some good baking potatoes and some low fat (or no fat) yogurt and threw it on our baked potatoes. It was good. The consistency was very similar to sour cream and the taste was very similar as well. The only real difference was that it was just a touch sweeter. So I got to thinking about ways to hide that sweetness without blowing the health benefits of yogurt over sour cream. The Greeks have this stuff called Tzatziki sauce that is a blend of yogurt, cucumbers, garlic, dill and some other stuff but it inspired me.

The next time we had baked potatoes I tried adding some pressed garlic. I swear, my garlic press can solve almost any kitchen problem (another shameless plug for Zyliss garlic presses). I think I may have overdone it by adding 4 cloves to one small container of yogurt but the results were awesome. My girlfriend and I have played around with the amount of garlic and have found 1 - 2 cloves per small container to be good. We have also substituted this in every recipe that calls for sour cream with success (tacos, burritos, baked potatoes etc...). We have even passed it off on unsuspecting people as sour cream and they never knew the difference until we told them.

I have my suspicion that if you were to add your favorite herb combination the results would be the same as garlic. I don't mind the hint of sweetness it has when used plain but if you want to cover hide it then try some oregano, basil or dill. Play around with it and see what you can come up with. I am not saying that replacing sour cream is the solution to a healthier diet but it is a small step you can take and more than likely you will never know the difference.

Ingredients:

6oz of Greek Yogurt ( I like Chobani)
1-2 cloves of garlic pressed

Mix garlic into the yogurt. Cover and chill until you are ready to use

I thought I would include the nutritional breakdown for the yogurt versus sour cream just for your viewing.

Versus  Light Sour cream (which I think tastes icky)

 

Ingredients: Grade A cultured cream, skim milk, vitamin A palmitate
2 Tbsp = about 1 oz
So multiply these values by 6 to see how it compares to the yogurt... and how many of us only use the recommended serving size of sour cream on our baked potatoes?



Just a side note to all of this... I used Daisey Sour Cream for the analysis. They only put nutritional info up for the light sour cream. The full strength stuff only had an ingredients list...