A balanced breakfast: granola and cardamom lassi.

An unbalanced breakfast: ginger lassi and rocky road fudge.

Ginger lassi prepped for blending in a mason jar.

I discovered breakfast lassi in the Food & Wine Annual Cookbook 2006. Heather Carlucci-Rodriguez’s recipe calls for yogurt, cardamom, sugar, and ice, whipped in a blender. They’re basically very simple smoothies without fruit.

Cardamom Lassi

Servings: 1
Preparation Time: 5 minutes
Heather Carlucci-Rodriguez
Review: Food & Wine Annual Cookbook 2006 (Jerry@Goodreads)

Ingredients

• 8 oz Greek yogurt (1 cup)
• 1-2 tbsp sugar
• 1 large ice cube
• ¼ tsp cardamom

Steps

1. Place all ingredients into blender container.
2. Grind until ice is ground.
3. Whip until desired consistency.

Blending cardamom lassi in the jar I’ll be drinking it from.

And the easy way to measure yogurt into a jar for blending: eight ounces is one cup.

It’s a simple recipe and easy to make right in the mug, if (a) your mug fits a standard mason jar top and (b) your blender accepts a standard mason jar top.

I don’t know how standard that feature is on blenders, but I’ve found it very useful on my Osterizer. It’s been useful enough that when I saw a nearly-identical model in the basement of an antique shop this summer, I picked it up as a spare. The “antique” version (service number 890-16F) looks a little nicer than the one I bought new many years ago (service number 890-08N), so I’ve made my original the spare, and you can see the basement antique in the pictures here.

The external parts are interchangeable, which means I also have an extra blade assembly and an extra jar. None of which I need for these recipes: I don’t need an extra blade, and I don’t use the large jar at all.

To further reduce the number of items that need cleaning, I measure the yogurt by weight rather than volume. Eight ounces of the Greek yogurt brand I use is one cup. By measuring it straight into the drinking glass, I don’t even need to clean a measuring cup when I’m done.

If it’s too thick for you, you can add water or more ice cubes.

There’s a recipe for a ginger yogurt dessert in Elizabeth Gordon’s Lincoln Continental Guide to Cuisines of the Western World. With only a moderate change, this provided my second breakfast lassi. By reducing the sugar and candied ginger, and adding ice cubes, it turns from a dessert to a drink. I like this one thinner than the cardamom lassi, so I add a bit of water as well.

Ginger Lassi

Servings: 1
Preparation Time: 10 minutes
Elizabeth Gordon

Ingredients

• 8 oz Greek yogurt (1 cup)
• 2 tbsp ginger candy
• 1 tbsp brown sugar
• 1 tsp lemon juice
• two ice cubes and enough water to make ⅓ cup

Steps

1. Add everything to the blender container.
2. Grind until ice is blended.
3. Whip until desired consistency.

This one’s a very refreshing morning drink, and in fact was my breakfast this morning as I write this. You can get the original back by not adding either ice or water, tripling the amount of candied ginger (which will now need to be chopped fine), adding an extra teaspoon of brown sugar, beating it together by hand, and chilling it in four custard cups.

The Food & Wine Annual Cookbook 2010 has Peggy Markel’s more involved saffron lassi. It requires softening the saffron twice, first in water and then in the yogurt while the yogurt is chilling. It makes less—only ¾ cup instead of a full cup—probably partly because the flavor of saffron is more filling than that of fruit or spices.

Saffron Lassi

Servings: 1
Preparation Time: 1 hour, 15 minutes
Peggy Markel
Review: Food and Wine Annual Cookbook 2010 (Jerry@Goodreads)

Ingredients

• 6¾ oz Greek yogurt (¾ cup)
• Small pinch of saffron
• 1 tbsp water
• 1 tbsp sugar
• 4 tbsp water

Steps

1. Crumble saffron into 1 tbsp water.
2. Mix sugar with 4 tbsp water.
3. Microwave sugar about one minute.
4. Stir until sugar dissolves.
5. Freeze about five minutes until cold.
6. Whisk yogurt with the saffron and syrup.
7. Refrigerate one hour, whisking occasionally, until cold and brightly-colored.

The saffron lassi can be made the night before, and I do occasionally make it because I enjoy saffron. But the other recipes are far easier, and far more easily varied. For example, feeling decadent a few mornings ago, I made cocoa-cardamom lassi. To the cardamom lassi I added cocoa and vanilla. Taking a cue from the saffron lassi, I also use less yogurt here, because I want the cocoa flavor to predominate. I’m not a fan of chocolate foods that don’t taste like chocolate.

You could do the same thing with malt, and I have, dropping the cardamom and using 2 tablespoons malted milk powder instead of the cocoa and vanilla. I’ve also replaced the basic recipe’s sugar with a favorite jam or jelly.

Cocoa Lassi

Servings: 1
Preparation Time: 5 minutes
Jerry Stratton

Ingredients

• 6¾ oz Greek yogurt (¾ cup)
• 1 tbsp sugar
• 1½ tbsp unsweetened cocoa powder
• ¼ tsp cardamom
• ⅛ tsp vanilla
• 2-3 ice cubes

Steps

1. Add all ingredients to blender container.
2. Grind until ice is blended.
3. Whip to desired consistency.

At that point it’s as untraditional a lassi as you can get. For a far more traditional lassi, you might try Bharti Kirchner’s Lebur Lassi from her Healthy Cuisine of India.

I’ve never made it, and had completely forgotten that I’d highlighted it for future meals. Back when I first started doing reviews of cookbooks, I would describe the recipes I did make and my impressions of them, and then add a recipe to the end of the review that was aspirational. The recipe was specifically a recipe that I did not make, but found to be an interesting comment on the kinds of things the cookbook contained.

The problem with that strategy is that I never had time, and now that I do I’d completely forgotten about it. Which is too bad, because that looks like a great breakfast lassi—or a great afternoon-sitting-out-on-the-back-porch lassi.

Lebur Lassi

Servings: 1
Preparation Time: 10 minutes
Bharti Kirchner
The Healthy Cuisine of India
The Healthy Cuisine of India^•

Ingredients

• ¾ cup plain yogurt
• ½ cup water
• 3 ice cubes
• 2 tsp sugar
• 2 tblsp fresh lime juice
• ¼ tsp salt
• dash nutmeg

Steps

1. Combine yogurt, water, ice sugar, lime, and salt in a blender.
2. Purée until smooth and bubbly and the ice cubes are crushed.
3. Pour into a chilled glass.
4. Sprinkle nutmeg on top before serving.

And when you’re making these in a blender, it is trivially easy to multiply by the number of people—four or less should easily fit in a single blender jar to be portioned out in separate cups. These are all very good, and a great way of satisfying a morning sweet tooth with a relatively healthy breakfast.

Unless, of course, you accompany it with rocky road fudge.