Blueberry Yogurt

By: Larry Gordon

There were no yogurts on the store shelves for a few weeks because the machinery was being updated to meet the growing demands of the market.

Having written the above paragraph, I’m wondering how I will be able to write a full essay on the subject of yogurt, including the various flavors, the taste, the thickness, the calories, and of course, the great demand for this grass-fed premium product.

{IMG Bagel – Blueberry yogurt

Just the other day, someone in shul said that if Bethel Creamery Yogurt was available in the kosher stores down in South Florida, he would move in a heartbeat. I looked at him with some incredulity and asked him if he was serious about the availability of a kosher yogurt product being so important that it was the determining factor in his moving to Florida.

I mean, this friend and I have a lot in common aside from belonging to the same shul and knowing many of the same people. His grandfather was even a Rebbe in a yeshiva I attended many years ago.

The yogurt company is owned and operated by my son-in-law and daughter, Eliezer and Dini Franklin, on their farm in Bethel, New York, a short distance from White Lake and a few miles from Monticello Raceway.

The dairy farm is on one side of the road known as Happy Avenue, and the slaughterhouse where chickens and ducks are prepared for your dinner table is on the other side.

Also open for the second season on the grounds of the farm is the Bethel Farm Café, where customers stream in from all parts of the Catskills for a rustic brunch, lunch, or even early dinner. Presently, it’s probably the hottest spot in the Catskills. They’re opening this week or next, but people have been stopping by since right after Shavuos to see if they’re open and what’s on the menu.

They prepare tasty, unique dishes like their super popular parfaits, exciting waffle dishes, and this year for the first time, they’re producing their own great tasting homemade Bethel Ice Cream. Up until this year, the farm crew has featured tractor driven farm tours, which they’re not offering this year because there’s not enough hours to squeeze the tours in while the café is busy.

The farm, which was founded by my mechutan, Rafael Franklin, decades ago, is a true down-home, built from the bottom-up farmstead. One of the additional exciting things about this entire enterprise is its location in the famous Catskills that will always be part of the homeland of the Jewish people in exile.

As far back as I can recall, my parents rented a bungalow in the Catskills way back in the 1960s. That was the location where immigrant city dwellers took the opportunity to get away to enjoy cool evenings during those hot summer nights.

In those days, not everyone had cars that enabled them to crawl along on what is today a very busy Route 17 on the way to the “country” as it was affectionately called. If you look around the town of Woodridge, for example, you’ll see rusty, aged railroad tracks that probably have not been used in decades. But those antique looking tracks were once used to transport people like our grandparents up to the mountains for a couple of weeks in the summer.

An additional unique aspect of the almost 100-acre Franklin farm is that it’s right next door to the iconic Yasgur farm once owned by a Catskills Jew named Max Yasgur.

Sometime back in 1968, Yasgur was approached by some music organizers about allowing his farm to be used for a music festival that would ultimately become an important part of rock music history. As it turns out, the Yasgur farm was the second choice for the music festival that summer in a town called Woodstock.

For whatever reason, the producers of the planned Woodstock music festival obviously wanted Woodstock. But the town council turned down the request, believing the obscure upstate village would be pillaged and wrecked by the rowdy crowd. The producers disagreed and vigorously objected. At the end of the day and in the aftermath of the concert that drew more than half a million people to the town of Bethel, where Yasgur’s farm was located, the place was indeed pillaged and wrecked.

It was the summer of 1969, a routine Catskills summer with the countryside filled with young Chassidishe and other Orthodox Jewish families. The only difference was that it did not stop raining for a minute. The music festival was knee high in mud and kids were hitchhiking all over the mountains and laid out, trying to sleep on any sliver of grass or farmland they could grab. According to Max’s son, Sam, his father agreed to rent the field to the festival organizers mostly because it was a very wet season, which curtailed hay production. They hoped the rental income from the festival would offset the cost of purchasing hay for their milk cows.

As I previously mentioned, I was at Camp Agudath that summer in Ferndale with a box seat watching police helicopters flying at such low altitudes that it felt like we could just reach out and touch them. The police and state troopers could be seen with their legs dangling out the sides of the copters, very often holding shotguns. I don’t think they had much occasion to use them.

From my memory, some of the groups that performed at Woodstock that summer included Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Jimi Hendrix, Richie Havens, Santana, Arlo Guthrie, the Grateful Dead, Canned Heat, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and many more. Who can forget those groups? I guess if you’ve never heard of these names in the first place then you can probably forget them too.

It took some years and some vision, but the Franklin family ultimately bought this farm, built a slaughterhouse, and before you could turn around, they were producing gourmet kosher chickens for their exclusive clientele.

Over the last few decades, ducks became a thing along with geese, squab (young pigeons), and other delicacies. But that is the other side of the road. For the last few weeks people have been panicking about the lack of Bethel yogurts on the refrigerated shelves. In Gourmet Glatt, people approached my wife and me to ask if we have any inside information on the status of Bethel’s yogurt deliveries. I really didn’t know much, so I called my daughter and Eliezer to get an update and pass it along. The message was that the yogurts will be arriving soon.

One man approached me to say his mornings have been disrupted by a lack of yogurt. He said he consumed a vanilla yogurt each morning and his daughter preferred the vanilla leben.

On the subject of leben, I received questions about leben, which I know even less about. Fortunately, there were no inquiries about chickens or ducks. All that despite the fact that the current daf yomi is focused on chicken and one person called me last week to get my son-in-law’s number because he wanted to take his shiur up to the farm to observe the technicalities of poultry shechita.

The good news is that the yogurts are back and lining the shelves of your favorite store. That includes the new, thick, yummy blueberry yogurts. Thankfully the old days are back, so get ready for your dairy treats. Gentlemen, grab your spoons! 

Read more of Larry Gordon’s articles at 5TJT.com. Follow 5 Towns Jewish Times on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter for updates and live videos. Comments, questions, and suggestions are welcome at 5TJT.com and on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.