Orange Cranberry Yogurt

Orange Cranberry Yogurt uses all the citrus to make a sweet, creamy, simple dessert.

We’ve got a new obsession in our house: Orange Cranberry Yogurt. My mouth is watering writing its name. 

For years, we’ve been making citrus salads. We love the sweet-tart combination of oranges and grapefruit with dried cranberries and a little sprinkle of fresh mint. But we think we’ve found something even better.

Lately, we are making citrus salad, but we’ve punched it up a little bit. How? We’re using a variety of citrus (more on that in a minute). And…we put a dollop of plain Greek yogurt on top. Crazy, I know. Dairy and citrus isn’t a common combination. But our little experiment opened our minds. It only happened because we were craving ice cream but knew we should be eating grapefruit, so we thought we’d add a little bit of creaminess to the grapefruit. A revelation! The creamy, tangy yogurt mixes with the fresh citrus juice and plumped-up cranberries for a truly winning dessert.

The other part of our citrus salad makeover (as if it needed one) is to use a true variety of citrus. Right now, we’ve got so much to choose from, it’s a shame not to use it while we can. So, to the grapefruit, we’ve added Cara Cara oranges, which are a deep orange color, almost red, and tangy. We also added Sumo oranges, the easy-to-peel, lumpy-skinned orange that’s super sweet. We threw in a regular old navel orange for fun. And we added the tiny segments from kishu mandarins, which add little pops of sweet orange to the mix. Dried cranberries turn plump and chewy, soaking up the grapefruit and orange juices.

I’ll admit the cutting-up of all this citrus is a little bit of a chore. But once you have this lovely bowl of oranges, grapefruit and cranberries, in sunset shades of orange and red, and once you swirl it with a little Greek yogurt, you’ll realize it’s so worth the time.

Orange Cranberry Yogurt

Ingredients: 
2 Ruby Red grapefruit 
2 Cara Cara oranges
1 Sumo orange
1 navel orange
4 or 5 kishu mandarins
½ cup dried cranberries
plain Greek yogurt

Recipe directions: 
Supreme the grapefruit, Cara Cara oranges, Sumo orange and navel orange: Cut off the ends of the fruit at the top and bottom (where the stem was). Stand the fruit up on one of the cut ends, and, with a sharp knife, slice the peel and white pith off by cutting down the fruit, from one end to the other. Hug the curve of the fruit with the knife so that you leave as much fruit as possible intact. Cutting down, vertically, cut as close to the membrane as you can get, using your knife to release the fruit from the membrane. Do the same thing on the other side of the segment, so that the two cuts meet at the center of the fruit and the segment is freed from the membrane. Do this all around the fruit until all the segments are released, then place the segments in a bowl and squeeze the leftover membranes over the fruit to release the juice.

Peel the kishu mandarins and add the segment (with their membranes) to the bowl. Fold in the cranberries. Refrigerate for at least an hour, so that the cranberries plump and release their sugar into the oranges and grapefruit.

Serve in bowls with a dollop of Greek yogurt on top.