Skyr

Skyr. My favorite yogurt in the whole entire world.

Five years ago my family was visiting friends in Iceland. Looking into their refrigerator for something delicious, Maria, a girl my age, handed me a tub of what looked like yogurt. She told me that it wasn’t just yogurt and that it was Icelandic. Scooping myself a bowl of Skyr, I gingerly put a spoonful of this white stuff to my tongue.

And that’s how we fell in love.

Skyr is along the same lines of those Greek, or strained, yogurts that people have been commercializing more and more these days. It has a similar texture and flavor and is really healthy. When I first tried the Greek yogurt Fage, I fell in love with that, and I settled with it as an alternative to Skyr. However, one day as I was looking for my weekly tub of Fage in the dairy aisle in Whole Foods in Boston, Massachusetts, I saw what my taste buds had been craving for over 5 years.

Buying the vanilla flavor, I sat down on a bench outside and opened my personal container of Skyr–it even came with a spoon! I put one scoop in my mouth, and then my whole mouth was watering.

Maybe it’s just me. Some people may not taste the difference between Skyr or some other alternative yogurt, but I do. Skyr is extremely healthy for you. One container, which is small, contains 16% of your daily value of calcium intake. There also is no fat in this yogurt, and there are at least 16 grams of protein in the container. Skyr is traditionally made with pasteurized skim milk and live active cultures. The flavor is kind of crazy, it has a  slightly sour dairy flavor, with a hint of residual sweetness.

I personally do not like the plain flavor as much as I do the vanilla. The strawberry one is good as well, but the blueberry is disappointing.

You can find Skyr at Whole Food Stores.