Here's another. This is not a UPF, and it's overtly dessert yogurt.
https://www.lafermiere.us/yogurts
(The fruit-at-the-bottom variants are presumably UPFs).
https://www.lafermiere.us/yogurts
(The fruit-at-the-bottom variants are presumably UPFs).
I can't know the latter since I can't buy that brand in Greece (for rather obvious reasons it's not imported here). If I look at the list of ingredients for e.g. the Vanilla Bean yogurt I see "Pasteurized Whole Milk, Pasteurized Cream..." and that's your stabilizer there.
How much is there? The "Nutrition Facts" label on top lists "Total fat 12g" per serving which is "1 container" of 140 grams. That's ~9% fat, so about 5% more than plain cow's milk (at 4g per 100g). The total fat is more than the fat in ewe's milk (about 6%). I ... guess the extra fat makes the milk and vanilla bean powder emulsion last a bit longer so it gets better mixed in during the fermentation time?
Dunno. The packaging says "Traces of vanilla seeds and marbling on top of the yogurt are the results of a natural infusion process". The other flavours don't have a similar disclaimer but they all have extra fat in the form of pasteurized cream.
So anyway you get both a stabilizer and uneven distribution at least for the vanilla. If you have a strong enough flavour I reckon that's not a problem though.
EDIT: (The fruit-at-the-bottom variants are presumably UPFs).
They don't have to. If you're just mixing some fruit in milk and then fermenting it to make yogurt, that's just processed (going by NOVA AFAIU). But looking at the ingredients list I see e.g. "Corn starch, Natural Flavor, Lemon Juice Concentrate, Pectin" etc. Ew. No, that's a UPF. You don't need to put that stuff in yogurt. Not if the point is to enjoy it.
>> No. Pasteurization isn't a UPF technique. See the problem?
My argument is that the extra fat is used as a stabilizer that wouldn't need to be included if the maker wasn't trying to force their yogurt to hold other stuff in it than milk. The use of a stabilizer makes it a UPF, not the fact that the cream is pasteurised- that makes no difference as you say.
Pasteurised milk is classified as Group 1 (Unprocessed or minimally processed food) in NOVA. Pasteurised cream is the same thing [1].
Pasteurisation doesn't have any stabilising effect.
I argued that the pasteurised cream added to the ingredients of the lafermiere yogurts is a stabiliser. The stabilisation effect comes from the increased viscosity of milk with added fat that helps the emulsion of milk and flavourings keep stable for longer than normal while milk sets during yogurt making.
I did not argue that the stabilisation effect comes from the fact that cream is pasteurised.
I argued that the lafermiere yogurt is a UPF because of the addition of pasteurised cream as a stabiliser.
I did not argue that the lafermiere yogurt is a UPF because of the pasteurisation of the added cream; or the milk itself for that matter.
And now I have to ask: in what sense could anything I said before be taken as a claim that pasteurisation is ultra-processing or that the lafermiere yogurts are UPFs because of pasteurisation?
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[1] If anything it has the opposite in that pasteurised milk tends to produce looser, softer curds than raw milk because it weakens protein bonds and causes calcium to leak out (soorta), hence the addition of calcium chloride to milk when making cheese.
Cream is usually made by centrifuging milk to separate the fat out, which should count as minimal processing and then pasteurisation itself is minimal processing on top. I doubt pasteurised cream counts as a UPF.
To be fair that doesn't really matter in yogurt making because milk is boiled anyway, which denatures milk proteins and we don't care if they leak calcium or not because we're not trying to make curd, as such, but yogurt. Not withstanding the fact that people in the Indian subcontinent call yogurt, "curd". Just a linguistic quirk.
The fact that lafermiere list milk and cream as "pasteurised" in their ingredients is probably something to do with marketing, to make it clear they aren't using raw milk, for whatever reason that might be necessary to clarify.
My fresh Rodopi ewe's milk yogurt lists as ingredient "full organic ewe's milk". They say nothing about pasteurisation and I doubt they even bother to pasteurise it since they're going to blast it with considerably more heat than for pasteurisation anyway. OtoH the difference may not be marketing but the fact that Rodopi get their milk directly from producers while lafermiere buy it second hand from dairy companies that sell it already-pasteurised. I mean the pasteurisation doesn't hurt. It's just unnecessary. So it's a bit weird that they clarify it in the list of ingredients.