London has been hot and humid recently. The kind of weather where I stop daydreaming about dinner for once and imagine cold showers and ice lollies instead. I’ve been drinking ice coffees to cool down and rather than cooking in the evenings, standing over the kitchen sink trying to keep the juice of a chilled watermelon or a sun ripened mango from running down my front.

Mangoes are one of the finest flavours in warm weather. Sunshine turns them into something really special, and it’s a joy to suck the flesh from the stone inside while holding it in sticky hands sitting outside. But few things are more refreshing than the subcontinent classic of a mango lassi.

Sweet velvety mango puree with creamy chilled yoghurt and the tiniest dash of salt cools any day or any curry down beautifully and I can’t get enough of them in Indian restaurants. I can never get them quite right at home though usually. The yoghurt isn’t thin enough for drinking consistency and if I water it down, I lose the flavour of the mango. But this heat had me determined to crack the code.

And that answer came with the recent discovery of buttermilk in the local Polish shop. I think we all know I’m totally and utterly obsessed with this ingredient and it’s a total fridge staple for me. The Polish stuff is a lovely loose consistency and I knew it would get the texture just right if I mixed it with the yoghurt. It did and I’ve been starting the morning with a glass of this amber nectar.

It put me in mind of how I’ve always meat to try making frozen yoghurt again after an ill fated attempt a few years ago where it frozen so densely, it took about an hour to defrost enough to chip a spoonful out by which time we’d eaten the dessert it went with and moved onto ice cold beers instead. Perhaps the buttermilk would sort the texture here too?

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