Let Them Eat Yogurt

"Wall Street is frozen-yogurt city now," says a beaming Richard Egan, executive vice president of Colombo yogurt. Indeed, any fair lunchtime brings out crowds of bankers and stockbrokers strolling about and licking 500 and 750 curl-topped frozen-yogurt cones. In midtown Manhattan, long queues snake around corners to the tiny frozen-yogurt parlors that seem to have sprung up everywhere. Washington too has dozens of stores selling the stuff as well as a cruising truck dispensing only frozen yogurt. "It's ice cream without guilt. It's magic," says the hopeful proprietor of Yogurt Yogurt, an Alexandria, Va., shop opening this week. The magic began four years ago in Cambridge's Harvard Square. There, in a hole in the wall called the Spa, William Silverman, a shrewd merchant, began selling the already popular cultured-milk product in a frozen version and soon attracted long lines of blue-jeaned teeny-boppers and J. Pressed Harvard men. The lines are still there. From the Spa, frozen yogurt leapfrogged to Manhattan's trendy Bloomingdale's, and is now well on its way to the South and West.

To make the frozen product, yogurt and stabilizers, plus any of dozens of flavors, are mixed in soft-ice cream machines (sales of which have been running 35% ahead of last year). Ten minutes later, a thick, soft, creamy swirl appears. Since the different brands-of yogurt that go into the machine vary greatly, so do the creamy swirls. Certain bacteria known as Lactobacillus bulgaricus and Streptococcus thermophi-lus are essential to the yogurt culture, yet there is no federal standard for the bacterial count. If the yogurt is pasteurized, as it sometimes is, the bacteria are killed. Freezing inhibits their growth. The calorie content depends on whether the yogurt is made from skim milk or whole milk and what kind of fruit and sweetening is added. "Yogurt is not like ketchup, which all tastes the same," explains Edward Gelsthorpe, president of H.P. Hood dairy. "It can go all the way from a very tart, thick product to a sweet, mild, creamy product, to a drink or a solid."

Frozen yogurt is actually just the latest ferment in the general yogurt boom. Exalted in ancient writings as the food of the gods, yogurt has become popular in the U.S. only in the past decade. In 1975 Americans ate 200,000 tons of it, nearly $300 million worth--up from $25 million in 1967.

Kesey and Cows. Jimmy Carter's septuagenarian mother, Miss Lillian, takes it as an appetizer before every meal. Atlanta's Mayor Maynard Jackson likes it for lunch. Author Ken Kesey raises his own cows in Oregon so he can control the yogurt making from start to finish.

Food faddists credit yogurt with nearly universal virtues. They say it prolongs life and improves the work of the digestive tract. (Dannon is preparing a TV commercial of 125-year-old Soviet Georgians eating yogurt.) Some women believe it makes an excellent douche and a fine face mask. Scientists make no such claims, although doctors do sometimes prescribe yogurt for patients taking antibiotics. The drugs indiscriminately destroy bacteria in the intestinal tract, and yogurt supposedly replaces them. Moreover, skim-milk yogurt is a good low-calorie source of protein, calcium and phosphorus.

To some very cultivated palates, however, yogurt's main virtue is its taste. Gourmet Craig Claiborne says it is "a sensational ingredient for cooking." Food Critic Gael Greene cautions that it cannot be compared with foie gras, or homemade butter-pecan ice cream. But she says that she breakfasts on yogurt "every disciplined morning," adding, "yogurt is definitely a best friend --but not a lover."

* Major manufacturers of frozen yogurt are Dannon. Hood and Colombo.

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