Lifestyle Cake Yazdi: Iranian yoghurt cake

[FRIDAY THE 13]

 

In the Red Hook neighbourhood of Brooklyn, New York, masterful yoghurt-makers balance sweet and tart in a creamily decadent fermented yoghurt, and preserve and its byproduct of whey. Iranian author, business owner and yoghurt expert, Homa Dashtaki, lies at the heart of the operation, sealing jars of this timeless kitchen staple with a label embellished with an illustration of a white moustache.

In her recent cookbook, Yogurt and Whey: Recipes of an Iranian Immigrant Life, Dashtaki uses her lifelong relationship with yoghurt and whey to tell the story of her culture, faith and relationship with food through her recipes. She emphasises sustainable food production and a battle against wastefulness, instilling these ideals into her 12-year-old yoghurt and whey business, The White Mustache, named for the facial hair of Dashtaki's earliest kitchen companion: her father.

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The White Mustache has remained steadfast in its goal of expanding the market for whey, in order to reduce waste. Rather than discard the whey, Dashtaki and her team bottle the highly nutritious yellow-green liquid and urge customers to use it for smoothies, meat marinades and brines and post-workout hydration. The company is even looking into producing whey chips for pets.

Growing up in Iran, her family always made yoghurt from scratch. It functioned as the basis for nearly all meals – sweet or savoury – at any time of day. Dashtaki recalls how conversations over boiling milk fostered a deeper relationship with her father, and, when she immigrated to the United States in 1987, with the small Zoroastrian community that she found in Southern California.

"Yoghurt forces you to slow down. It takes a long time for the milk to boil – and an even longer time for the milk to cool. And in that time, everything feels better," she explained. "Yoghurt was the excuse for this togetherness, the result of longing to connect and rebuild some semblance of communal village activities around food that we'd been yearning for ever since we left Iran."

 

link : https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20230818-cake-yazdi-iranian-yoghurt-cake