If you want to up your yogurt game, this Iranian cookbook will show you the whey
/
The White Moustache
Homa Dashtaki is the founder of The White Moustache yogurt company. (Her father's moustache inspired the name.) Her new book is called Yogurt & Whey: Recipes of an Iranian Immigrant Life.
Homa Dashtaki didn't really think about her relationship to food until shortly after she was laid off from a career in law, and was living at home in California. She and her father would make yogurt together from scratch, just the way her Zoroastrian-Iranian ancestors had done for many generations. The comfort in taking up ancient traditions was enough to inspire her to completely pivot and start her own business selling yogurt at a local farmers' market.
From the reaction of customers, she says, she realized they were onto something.
Chris Simpson / W. W. Norton & Company
/
W. W. Norton & Company
Yogurt & Whey includes nearly 100 recipes, many drawing from Iranian culinary traditions.
After many hurdles including an attempt, she says, at being shut down by the California Department of Food and Agriculture and a subsequent move to New York The White Moustache was born. Named in honor of her father's bushy whiskers, the yogurt has become a cult item for the kind of New Yorker who shops in stores such as Whole Foods, Eataly and the Park Slope Food Coop.
In her new cookbook,
Yogurt and Whey: Recipes of an Iranian Immigrant Life,
Dashtaki weaves her personal journey through nearly 100 recipes, old and new. One key ingredient is whey, the liquid byproduct of the yogurt-making process. With recipes such as whey cocktails and popsicles, the book demonstrates a central value of both her culture and business: nothing goes to waste.
"Every scrap is not thought of as trash," Dashtaki says. "It's thought of as an opportunity to celebrate that food."
Think about butchering an animal "from head to toe, you are using every single piece of it," Dashtaki says. "And in a celebratory way ... I think that very intense feeling has sort of informed everything I do."
Yogurt and Whey
arrives just in time for this year's Persian New Year (or
Nowruz
in Persian), and the start of spring.
Below, find Dashtaki's recipe for pancakes featuring whey.
Whey-to-Start-the-Weekend Pancakes
1 1/3 cups all-purpose flour
2 tablespoons sugar
Monday, March 20, 2023 at 9:10 am