How long can yogurt safely sit out on the counter? Is it safe to eat yogurt past its sell-by date? How can I tell if my yogurt has gone bad?
If you’ve ever had these questions — maybe even if you haven’t, but you consume a lot of yogurt — you’ll want to read Kristen Miglore’s guide to all things yogurt food safety. The good news is that our favorite breakfast (and cooking) staple is surprisingly lost-lasting. But not all yogurt “is created traditionally or equally,” Kristen writes. She shares “what to keep in mind when determining the likely resilience of your own supply, and how to know when you’ll want to move it along to the compost.”
You can read her helpful article here. Then, with that container of plain yogurt, you can make Ali Slagle’s yogurt-marinated roast chicken. “Marinating chicken in yogurt, much like buttermilk, creates juicy meat and caramelized skin, but yogurt’s additional fat and lactic acid contribute extra richness and tang,” Ali writes. “The practice of marinating meat in yogurt likely dates as far back as 13th-century Central Asia and has stood the test of time for good reasons.” I’m guessing “never having buttermilk on hand but always having yogurt” isn’t one of the top reasons, but it is in my home.
Featured Recipe
Yogurt-Marinated Roast Chicken
Two more yogurty recipes before we move away from the dairy aisle: Zaynab Issa’s smashed beef kebab with cucumber yogurt, which is only a couple of months old but has already racked up five stars and over 1,000 reviews, and Claudia Roden’s yogurt cake, a six-ingredient wonder adapted by Melissa Clark. They both make great use of thick, tangy Greek yogurt.
Shoulder-season weather calls for shoulder-season cooking — recipes that infuse an extra hour’s worth of lightness into cozy dishes. Yasmin Fahr’s miso mushroom pasta fits this bill perfectly, with a zingy splash of vinegar brightening up a base of melty leeks and mushrooms. And the nuttiness of Sue Li’s creamy cauliflower-cashew soup is balanced with tart apple, a nice little floral flavor nod to all the blossoms we’re about to see.
Braised pork shoulder? Wintry. But Sarah DiGregorio’s honey-soy braised pork shoulder with lots of zesty garlic and ginger and soy and chile and lime? That’s a dish that has just bought new sunglasses for all this 6 p.m. sun we’re getting.
As March marches on, I’m still trying to make good on my 2025 resolution to eat more sardines, so I’ve bookmarked this new sardine and egg sandwich from Lena Richard, adapted by Genevieve Ko. It’s nothing fussy — just hard-boiled eggs smushed with sardines, salt, mayo and cayenne. But, I think, with the nice sardines I brought home from the Portuguese grocery store the neighborhood over and the nice white bread I got from our local bakery, it’ll be transcendent.
Sorry, I have one more yogurty recipe for you: Nutella banana bread. This Yossy Arefi treat doesn’t put yogurt front and center; the star here is, of course, those swirls of chocolate-hazelnut spread. But a big spoonful of plain yogurt gives this loaf its lift and balances out the Nutella and the brown butter. And several readers note they have successfully swapped in sour cream, in case you’ve already used up all the yogurt.
