Yogurt & Whey: Recipes of an Iranian Immigrant Life (Hardcover)

Yogurt & Whey: Recipes of an Iranian Immigrant Life By Homa Dashtaki Cover Image

Yogurt & Whey: Recipes of an Iranian Immigrant Life (Hardcover)

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A Los Angeles Times Best Cookbook of 2023 • A WBUR Here & Now Best Cookbook of 2023 • One of Eater's 12 Best Cookbooks of Spring 2023



A collection of recipes reflecting a life affected by immigration, community, adaptation, and experimentation—and sublime, old-world, creamy yogurt.


As founder of much-loved The White Moustache Yogurt company, Homa Dashtaki employs the same traditionally Iranian methods of making yogurt that her family has for generations in her kitchen today. Her passion culminates in inspiring the use of a new ingredient: whey, the liquid gold extracted from straining homemade yogurt. Across 100 recipes ranging from ancient see-rogh to rum cocktails, ghormeh sabzi to lemon meringue pie, Dashtaki weaves in and out of nostalgic and innovative dishes. The result of years of obsessively making yogurt results in a love for every drop of whey that she passes onto home cooks in these recipes. Embrace whey’s bright tang in a summer gazpacho or a pitcher of pineapple margaritas. Enjoy the crispy edges it lends to creamy pancakes.


Enlivened by hand-drawn illustrations and dreamy photographs, Yogurt & Whey is a beautiful homage to Iranian yogurt traditions—past, present, and future.



Homa Dashtaki is the founder of the White Moustache. Her artisanal yogurt has garnered acclaim from the New York Times, Vogue, Bon Appétit, and Food & Wine. She was born in Iran and now lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Product Details ISBN: 9780393254532
ISBN-10: 0393254534
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Publication Date: March 7th, 2023
Pages: 280
Language: English
Yogurt & Whey is ultimately a reminder of why cooking is so important: It’s a love letter to a minority culture with just about 15,000 to 20,000 members left in Iran, rooted in Dashtaki’s sense of responsibility to keep her community’s traditions alive.

— Bettina Makalintal - Eater

I had tears in my eyes holding @homadash of @whitemoustacheyogurt’s immaculate cookbook…This book could not be more gorgeous & brilliant.
— Porochista Khakpour, author of Sick: A Memoir and Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity, on Instagram

When it comes to yogurt, there is no greater authority than Homa Dashtaki. Dashtaki is the founder of White Moustache Yogurt, a Brooklyn-based yogurt brand crafting creamy and luxurious yogurt with traditional techniques. Her debut book features 100 recipes which use yogurt in both long-established and innovative techniques. The book chronicles Dashtaki’s path as an Iranian immigrant who became a yogurt entrepreneur after pursuing a career in law. In this book you’ll see yogurt transformed through new and old techniques that result in dishes like traditional Iranian ghormeh sabzi, or even tangy rum cocktails which are made with whey. This book is a love letter to Iran’s diasporic cooking traditions through yogurt, one of the most elemental ingredients.
— Lucy Simon - Food & Wine

If you want to up your yogurt game, this Iranian cookbook will show you the whey.
— Diba Mohtasham - NPR

[Dashtaki’s] movingly articulated sentiments and stories—and the recipes they’ve inspired—will have many of us absorbed.
— Los Angeles Times

An edifying and delicious exploration of Zoroastrian cuisine and the many innovative uses of yogurt and its usually discarded by-product, whey…[these] eponymous ingredients prove to be amazingly versatile…Dashtaki proves a skilled and thoughtful writer, and her reverence for the dishes she offers makes this a treat.
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Truly one of a kind…[Yogurt & Whey] demands to be read, with stories both ancient and modern and fillips of fancifulness and humor: 'When combined with whey, not only does the cauliflower sing, it puts on a one-woman chorus line.'

— Barbara Jacobs, Booklist