Low Fat Substitutes for Cooking with Cream Cheese

Video Transcript

"Hi, I’m Kirsten Herbes. I am a registered dietitian and health educator. Another ingredient often used in recipes or as a topping for the foods that we eat is cream cheese. Cream cheese again comes from the dairy group but cream cheese is comprised of about 43 percent fat so obviously you are getting a lot of extra calories and a lot of fat gram in the cream cheese that you eat. They do come in reduced fat and fat free varieties. The reduced fat variety or the light variety is generally very close as far as taste is concerned and textured still maintained very well. However, the fat free cream cheese tends to be a lot greasier; there are a lot of substitutions that have to be made in order to give it that texture so it doesn’t hold up as well in cooking recipes. A good alternative if you are looking for cream cheese as a flavoring agent or as a topping it is something call Yogurt Cheese. Yogurt cheese is really not your true cheese. It is made from regular yogurt but it simply the Yogurt with the weight part of the yogurt drained away. I am going to show you an easy way that you can made yogurt cheese right at home. What you need is just a simple bowl and in this case I am using a double layer of coffee filter, this is just regular coffee filter, two of them stuck together. You want to go ahead and put those in your sieve so this is what you should have. Another version that you can use instead of a coffee filter is a cheese cloth if you have a cheese cloth. You want to take 2 cups of regular yogurt. I chose a non-fat variety because obviously we are trying to reduce the fat. You simply want to add the yogurt to your coffee filter, both cups. After it sits for about 8 hours overnight in the refrigerator you will see that the liquid has drained away and what remains is the sticky part of the yogurt which will be in this coffee filter and you simply want to take a knife or spoon and scrape that away from the edges of the sieve and put it in a plastic container. It will last in the refrigerator for about a week. This is a good substitute for a spread able cheese on something you may have used as a topping on a bagel or crackers. You can add chives and other herbs to it to give you the same flavor and same texture as you would have in a cheese that you may purchase that is normally made with cream cheese. "