Can I eat this: Yoghurt hack

April 2, 2017 2:38 AM

Am I safely adding frozen berries and honey to my yoghurt or am I skirting the shoals of the salmonella sea?

I'm trialling adding my own frozen berries and a little organic honey to my yoghurts for work-day snacks. I love yoghurt but find all the flavoured/fruit varieties nauseatingly sweet and the "fruit" like jam.

I can stomach plain, unsweetened yoghurt, but it does get boring. My idea is to remove about ~20% of the yoghurt from each single serve, replace that volume with frozen berries and a teaspoon of honey, then replace the lid and refrigerate until consuming.

I have great little individual serve unsweetened yoghurts with proper pop-on/off lids, not the peel-back foil kind. And reliably good quality frozen berries and fresh honey.

My question is: can doing this expose me to food-borne pathogens or does this modest food hack flag for anyone as dangerous?

The removed yoghurt mass (from 4 individual yoghurts) gives me a bonus 5th yoghurt snack too - in a small container. My kitchen and utensils are clean and the refrigeration is reliable.

Thanks yoghurt friends.

posted by esto-again to Food & Drink (8 answers total)

Best answer: I have no idea how that could expose you to anything! Presumably your berries and honey are not contaminated. Your yoghurt is not contaminated. You are keeping everything in the fridge. (And even if you weren't, yoghurt is basically designed to preserve milk so it would last a little while). Honey is even antibacterial.

You are more than fine.
posted by lollusc at 2:40 AM on April 2, 2017 [11 favorites]

(I guess the only issue to be aware of is the use by dates on your yoghurt would be set under the assumption that the lid has not been removed, and the yoghurt not exposed to air. Having done that might accelerate spoilage a little, so maybe after you've added the honey and berries try to use the yoghurt within maybe a week or something, but even so, I think use by dates on yoghurts tend to be overly pessimistic.)
posted by lollusc at 2:42 AM on April 2, 2017

If this practice was dangerous, I would have died daily for the last 30 years. You're fine.
posted by yes I said yes I will Yes at 2:58 AM on April 2, 2017 [9 favorites]

Beyond safe. This has been my on-again/off-again breakfast since at least 2010.
posted by whitewall at 3:52 AM on April 2, 2017

Yes, this is totally fine as long as the frozen berries are not contaminated. We had this whole Hep A contamination thing here a couple of years ago, so I don't really buy frozen berries anymore.
posted by kinddieserzeit at 4:30 AM on April 2, 2017 [4 favorites]

In some retirement homes the recommendation is to boil frozen berries for a minute before using because of the above mentioned risk of hepA. So there's a risk but not a huge one and also hopefully you are vaccinated already against hep A / hep B. On a personal level I add frozen berries and granola to yogurt. I don't have a citation offhand about the boiling berries recommendation but I read it in barfblog which does cite everything they report
posted by biggreenplant at 7:07 AM on April 2, 2017 [1 favorite]

Safe as long as you don't go by the yoghurt use-by date, which can be quite a few weeks out. Once opened and with berries added, I'd say they're good for a week.
posted by beagle at 12:13 PM on April 2, 2017 [1 favorite]

I was also impacted by the hep A berry scare, so I don't frozen berry anymore.
posted by St. Peepsburg at 1:31 PM on April 2, 2017