Special Sauce: The White Moustache’s Homa Dashtaki Makes the Best Yogurt in the US [1/2]

Special Sauce with Ed Levine

I have a confession: Until Daniel Gritzer told me about The White Moustache a couple of months ago, I 'd never heard of it, much less its founder, Homa Dashtaki. Now, after interviewing Homa and trying her yogurt, I can tell you that Daniel was right when he said it would change my life. First of all, the yogurt is so tasty, so thick and creamy, that I can't think of a reason not to eat some every day (which I've done ever since first trying it). Secondly, Homa is a force of nature, someone whose point of view and story might be better than her ridiculously good yogurt, as you'll find out in her two episodes of Special Sauce.

Homa even arrived on this earth in dramatic fashion. "I was born the day of the Iranian Revolution," she tells me. "So the day that the Ayatollah arrived in Iran I was born, and my mom had to go to the hospital in a police escort because there was a curfew, and that's probably why I'm so wired to like chaos all around me."

After emigrating as a child to Orange County, she ended up going to law school and, yes, practicing corporate law for a while. Why? "Oh, I loved the whole idea of it. You would tell me what you wanted, you'd put down on paper, everything would be clear," she recalls. "And I remember when I first found out about prenups, I remember everyone was very negative about them. I'm like, 'How wonderful! When you're getting into this really intense relationship that everyone would just be above board, you either know how great it's gonna be, or how fucked you're gonna be. It's all laid out.'"

Her legal career was cut short after she was laid off from her firm. And, after a period of self-described drifting, she found herself drawn to one of the foods that was a staple of her childhood. "We picked making yogurt because to me it was easy, I was being lazy about it," she says. "I'm like, 'There's only one ingredient, milk, right? Now how hard can this be?'"

It turned out that Homa fell in love with making yogurt. "I don't know if you've ever made yogurt at home, but it's a very magical process," she observes. "It's almost like you step into a time portal, and you have to slow down time. In order for your yogurt to take, it has to be coddled. You have to boil the milk, and you have to get it to the right temperature. That's actually no easy task. You have to pay attention to the milk, you can't just set it and forget it."

She and her father started out making small batches- eight gallons to be exact- of yogurt overnight at a nearby Egyptian restaurant and selling it at a farmers market in Orange County. She was in heaven, until the state of California shut her down. "I had finally found something that was truly my own, and it felt so- I know it sounds cliché and it sounds cheesy- but it was so authentic, and I was so lost, that to have this thing ripped away from me felt so incredibly unfair," she recalls. "And I just fought back after weeping for days. I mean, it was like somebody had ripped something away from me."

To find out how she got her yogurt groove back, you're just going to have to listen to Homa tell the story herself on Special Sauce. It's definitely a story you won't want to miss.

--- The full transcript for this episode can be found over here at Serious Eats: https://www.seriouseats.com/2019/01/special-sauce-homa-dashtaki-1.html