Stracciatella yogurt is vanilla yogurt with tiny chocolate chips or chocolate shavings. Stracciatella ice cream, yogurt, quark (curd) and alike are very popular especially in Southern and Central Europe. Usually these delicacies are very high in carbs and nowadays contain no-no stuff, like high-fructose corn syrup and cornstarch. Thanks to the grasping food industry, of course.
My recipe, however, is something else. First of all, this yogurt fun to prepare. Secondly, it tastes heavenly. Last but not least, it’s healthy! Just think about the probiotics in the yogurt gently nurturing your stomach while the antioxidants and flavonoids in the darkest of the dark chocolate give your strength and energy.
Now comes the best part: you don’t need more than 5 ingredients to make this dainty. If you would like to make things really simple, you need just 3. Please feast on!
Tips for making the sugar-free stracciatella yogurt
It’s good to keep the yogurt as cold as possible. Then the melted chocolate for sure solidifies into tiny chips and doesn’t dissolve in the yogurt.
I’ve used not less than 100% chocolate in this recipe. Might sound wild, but in reality the yogurt and the stevia tame the sharp intensity of the chocolate. Of course, nothing prevents you from using milder chocolate, but I recommend to use dark chocolate in any case. Mild chocolate might not give enough flavor. And really dark chocolate is simply healthier and low in carbs.
The flavors get even better if you let the ready yogurt stand in the fridge for few hours or overnight.
I usually melt chocolate in a water bath. I boil some water in a water kettle and pour the boiling water into a saucepan. Then I put the chopped chocolate in a heatproof mug and put the mug in the saucepan with hot water. I let it stand for few minutes stirring the chocolate occasionally. It doesn’t take long before the chocolate is melted. Just be careful not to let any water into the chocolate, otherwise it forms an ugly lump and you have to start everything from scratch.
When you have poured all the chocolate into the yogurt, there is usually some chocolate left in the mug. A rubber spatula is great in getting everything out.
Instead of scraping the leftover chocolate I like to add hot water or coffee to the mug and make nice chocolate coffee or hot chocolate. A dash or more heavy cream, and a tasty and warming drink is ready.
My experiments with the sugar-free stracciatella yogurt
My husband, who is German, loves all kinds of stracciatella goodies, especially yogurt and quark (curd). As low-carbers we didn’t find any suitable commercial products. Like so often, I decided to develop my own, healthy version. I think I succeeded, since this recipe was approved by my husband with praise.
At first I doubted that adding just melted chocolate to the yogurt might not bring the best results. The chocolate chips or shavings should be melt-in-your-mouth type. I thought that pure melted chocolate makes too hard chips and you hardly taste them. Therefore, in my first experiment I melted equal amounts of 100% chocolate and organic extra virgin coconut oil.
I added the melted mixture to the yogurt and stirred with a spoon, but the chocolate didn’t solidify. It didn’t form nice chips, it simply dissolved in the yogurt. Well, the result was nice and smooth chocolate yogurt, delicious as well, but I wanted stracciatella, so tiny chocolate chips.
In my next trial I melted only 100% chocolate, and poured that into the yogurt. The chocolate solidified into tiny chips, just like I had hoped! I was missing more sweetness and less vanilla flavor, so I had to adjust still amounts of those in my following experiments.
When I added stevia to the melted chocolate, the flavor became really nice. Erythritol, even the powdered type, would have made the chocolate lumpy and gritty, that’s why I chose liquid stevia. Also in the yogurt I used powdered erythritol because of reducing the possibility for grittiness. Powdered erythritol dissolves in the yogurt much more easier than erythritol crystals. I added also some stevia to the yogurt to give more sweetness and reduce the cooling effect of erythritol.
At first I used 1 teaspoon vanilla extract. For my taste buds that was too much. I decided to cut the amount by half. My taste buds commended.
You might wonder why don’t I simply add ready chocolate shavings or grated chocolate to the yogurt, but rather melt the chocolate first. First of all, melting the chocolate is absolutely funnier method. Seeing the melted chocolate to solidify into tiny chips or shavings is simply fun. Try it with your kids!
Secondly, at least when I grate chocolate it’s a huge mess. If not the whole kitchen is covered by grated chocolate, at least the table and most of the floor is. Nowadays I grate the chocolate on a plate in the kitchen sink, but it’s still all messy.
And third, you can control the size of the chocolate chips by the speed of mixing. The faster you mix the melted chocolate and the yogurt, the smaller chocolate chips you get. And vice versa.
Anyway, melting the chocolate is not that big thing, it basically melts by itself. It just needs stirring every now and then.
Tips for variation
For smooth chocolate yogurt you can do like I did in my first experiment: simply melt 1 oz (30 g) 100% chocolate and 1 oz (30 g) organic extra virgin coconut oil. Add the stevia. Mix the melted mixture in the yogurt, where you have added the erythritol, stevia and vanilla extract.
If you want to make things really simple, you can use just 3 ingredients: 100% chocolate, vanilla stevia or unflavored stevia and yogurt. Melt the chocolate and add there 10 drops stevia. Mix until well mixed. Add 30–40 drops stevia to the yogurt. Mix the chocolate and the yogurt as directed. Add more stevia or other sweetener if needed.
To make flavors even richer and smoother, you can add some whipped cream. Or decorate the servings with nice dollops of whipped cream.
For more crunchiness, you can add chopped nuts. Pecans suit especially well.
If you are a friend of mint chocolate flavor, you can add finely chopped mint leaves to the yogurt, or some peppermint flavor.
Hope you enjoy this recipe!
Sugar-Free Stracciatella Yogurt
Ingredients
- 1 lb = 450 g organic plain Greek or Turkish yogurt (fat content 10%)
- 3 tablespoons Confectioner’s Style Swerve OR powdered erythritol
- 20 + 10 drops liquid stevia
- 1/2 teaspoon organic vanilla extract
- 1 oz = 30 g 100% chocolate
Instructions
- In a medium bowl, mix well together the yogurt, erythritol, stevia and the vanilla extract. Refrigerate.
- Cut the chocolate into small pieces and melt it for example in a water bath.
- Add 10 drops stevia to the melted chocolate and mix well with a spoon.
- Pour half of the chocolate into the bowl with yogurt. Mix fast and well with a spoon so that the chocolate solidifies into tiny chips.
- Pour the rest of the chocolate into the bowl with yogurt and mix again fast and well.
- Enjoy!
| Nutrition information | Protein | Fat | Net carbs | kcal |
| In total: | 20.5 g | 60.4 g | 26.4 g | 735 kcal |
| Per serving if 3 servings in total: | 6.8 g | 20.1 g | 8.8 g | 245 kcal |
| Per serving if 4 servings in total: | 5.1 g | 15.1 g | 6.6 g | 184 kcal |
Hi, just found your website. Thanks for all the great looking recipes. I, too, like to eat natural foods. I’ve lost 60 pounds low carbing in the last year. I do have a question for you about erythritol. What is it and how is it different from xylitol, which is the sweetener I’ve been using, which comes from the birch tree. Have you used xylitol in any of your recipes and have they turned out ok? Again, thanks so much I love your website!
Hi Kim! Congratulations on your remarkable weight loss!
Erythritol is also a sugar alcohol, like xylitol. The texture is very much similar to xylitol. However, erythritol differs from xylitol in many ways. Usually it’s tolerated much better than xylitol, so it doesn’t upset stomach that easily. It doesn’t have any effective carbs, and usually it doesn’t have any effect on blood sugar levels. It’s also great for teeth since it doesn’t promote tooth decay. Some studies show that it’s even better for teeth than xylitol.
Erythritol is a very natural sweetener. It occurs naturally for example in some fruits and fermented foods. Here is a Wikipedia article on erythritol: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erythritol
I buy my erythritol from iHerb (http://www.iherb.com/Now-Foods-Erythritol-100-Pure-Natural-Sweetener-1-lb-454-g/579?at=0&rcode=IRA341) since I’ve found it very cheap there.
I haven’t used xylitol for a very long time after finding erythritol and stevia. However, I expect that my recipes work also with xylitol. Xylitol is slightly sweeter than erythritol, so you might want to adjust the amount of xylitol to your liking. You can try to substitute granulated xylitol for erythritol crystals, and powdered xylitol for powdered erythritol. If you try, please let me know how it turned out!