Or, if you don’t have enough space in the fridge, or to speed things up, spread the Greek yogurt on paper towels. If you want your Greek yogurt posing as quark to be really firm, put it in a colander lined with several layers of cheesecloth, place the colander over a bowl, cover it and drain it overnight in the fridge. Yes, that is considered low-fat in Germany! Theoretically you could use 2% Greek yogurt but I find that 0% Greek yogurt works best. Most German baking recipes call for Magerquark, which is low-fat quark with less than 10% fat.

It works great in baked goods, both in cake and pastry fillings, desserts and in my favorite low-fat sweet or savory pie crust called Quark-Ölteig in German (find my recipe here). There are many different brands, and compared to quark Greek yogurt is reasonably priced. Ricotta and cottage cheese are not good alternatives, they are too gritty even when blitzed in the food processor and they lack the creaminess of quark.īut thankfully Greek yogurt has come to the rescue for all of us quark lovers, flooding the dairy shelves of virtually every supermarket. Since then, quark, both imported and domestic, has popped up here and there but it is still not widely available in the United States – and expensive, unless you don’t mind spending $11 for a pound of quark that goes into a German Käsekuchen (cheesecake).

Like other formulas for homemade quark it is a lengthy process and the quark does not hold up well in baked goods. In my German cookbook, which was first published in 2004, I included a recipe for quark made with rennet.

Quark was the first real food my parents fed me as a baby so it was only natural that I’ve been on a quark quest since I came to America almost 20 years ago.ĭuring the first few years after I moved here quark was nowhere to be found. Besides German bread and white asparagus, quark is probably the food Germans living abroad crave the most.

Quark yogurt