Easy Probiotic Panna Cotta Recipe With Berry Sauce

This fantastic probiotic panna cotta is made with cultured or clabbered milk or cream. It is not cooked to retain all the health benefits.

Panna cotta is a classic Italian recipe that is normally made with cooked cream and gelatin. I wanted to turn this delicious dish into a Christmas dessert, but because I feel passionate about probiotic foods and healthier eating, I decided to make this with cultured cream. It’s perfect for all occasions with the simple raw berry sauce recipe provided here. But for Christmas I was inspired to pair it with my delicious cranberry orange raisin sauce. They are a holiday-worthy match. 

This dessert is silky, rich, and very adaptable to use with so many toppings and sauces, as well as occasions. Change your toppings to make it festive for Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Fourth of July, Easter, harvest festivals, birthdays or a summer picnic. You could even just serve it with maple syrup or honey drizzled over it for a delicious little snack, or easy dessert in a glass, any time.

Today I’m adding a simple berry sauce that complements it perfectly and is easy to make any time of the year. Use frozen berries for the holidays or fresh ones during berry season. You’ll love how quick and easy this comes together and it’s great to make ahead too. 

Here is where you can find my easy Clabbered Milk Recipe. And if you love creamy dairy desserts, try to Make Your Own Quark, then make one of my delicious probiotic quark desserts like Quark Mousse With Oranges, Strawberry Quark Dessert,  and Lemon Cheesecake Mousse! I recommend serving Vanillekipferl (shortbread crescents) or Zimtsterne (cinnamon stars) with this dessert! If you want to explore more probiotic dairy recipes don’t miss reading about how cheese happens in the Natural Cheese Making guide.

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Easy Probiotic Panna Cotta With Berry Sauce

I’ve been thinking about making panna cotta for a while and finally found a great reason for it when I made my Christmas Cranberry Orange Salad and wanted to turn it into dessert. This creamy Italian dessert is a fabulous basic recipe that you can easily dress up in so many ways. It is delicious all on its own, but boy, does it ever become special topped with a simple berry sauce, fresh berries, or even just honey or maple syrup. 

Other dairy puddings like Creme Brulee for example, involve a lot more care and steps. This healthy panna cotta dessert is much quicker to prepare and has more health benefits. You just need to give it time to culture and a few hours to set in the refrigerator. Then let your imagination go wild. 

Why You’ll Love This Recipe

This dessert is so easy to make!

Panna Cotta tastes fantastically creamy and delicious!

My Panna Cotta is probiotic, made with cultured cream or milk and is full of gut-friendly bacteria and helps to get your digestive system motivated after a rich holiday meal. 

Panna Cotta is a perfect neutral creamy base for dressing up with your favorite toppings. Think berry sauce, fresh macerated berries, honey, maple syrup, cajeta, caramel sauce, chocolate fudge sauce, white chocolate sauce, orange syrup, maple syrup, or any kind of syrup. Even jam would be great.

This Panna Cotta will work toward better health, not against it. 

Make this with raw milk or cream, or purchased organic cream and add culture. When you let it culture for at least 24 hours it will be easier to digest, similar as with yogurt, in case you have a bit of a lactose intolerance. 

Probiotic Healthy Panna Cotta Tips And Substitutions

Cultured Cream

I raise goats and cream is unfortunately hard to get from goat’s milk, so I purchased some organic cream and added my probiotic raw milk clabber whey to culture it. 

If you want to make this with raw milk, follow my instructions on making clabber, which will probably take a couple of days to get thick if you make it from scratch. Use the milk clabber to make a lighter panna cotta or use a spoonful of it to culture either your raw skimmed cream or purchased pasteurized cream. 

If you don’t have raw milk to use as a base for making cultured panna cotta, use cultured buttermilk from the store to kick start your fermentation, or, if you have a sourdough starter, you can use that by adding a spoonful of sourdough to some milk, let it thicken over 24 hours time and then take a spoonful of that to use as a starter for your cream. 

In a nutshell: Start with purchased or raw cream (or half and half), add a spoonful of whey, buttermilk or other cultured dairy, let it sit for 24 hours and you’ll have the basis for this recipe.

Flavorings:

To make classic Panna Cotta, the cream gets boiled with lemon rind and a vanilla bean that has been cut open and scraped. You can certainly do that and culture your cream once it cools down. But I just used vanilla extract, which is easier to keep on hand, cheaper, and quicker.

I also added almond flavoring, because I’m using these for my Christmas dessert with my homemade cranberry orange raisin sauce, and I wanted the almond flavor in the panna cotta for a more Christmassy taste. 

How to make Healthy Probiotic Panna Cotta

Equipment

2 quart pot or stainless steel bowl – This will be used to heat and culture the cream.

Wire whisk or spoon – Use this to mix the starter culture or whey and other ingredients into the cream.

Ramekins, prep bowls, muffin pan or serving glasses – These are for used as a mold for the panna cottas. I like the muffin pans for a perfect size, but would not recommend using them if you have other options. And with a silicone muffin pan, it’s hard to get the Panna Cottas out in one piece. Pretty much impossible. With steel muffin tins, you’d have to dump them out all at once which might not be what you want. Singular Prep Bowls or ramekins are more convenient for un-molding. Panna cotta is very rich and a little goes a long way. You can make eight 4 oz servings with this recipe. You could also make a single larger panna cotta using a bowl or pan that will accomodate 24 oz of Panna Cotta comfortably. Use as a mold or serve from the bowl.

Small stainless steel bowl or 1 cup stainless steel measuring cup – You’ll be blooming and dissolving the gelatin in this container.

Measuring spoons

Ingredients

I choose to use organic ingredients if at all possible. Where I live, organic seems to be a foreign language word, lol. It’s hard to find even a single organic item in the town’s grocery store and Walmart carries a very limited amount of items. So I do some mail-ordering and I use Azure Standard for things I don’t grow or make myself. But I can get organic half and half and organic whipping cream here, so that is awesome. Goats milk is naturally homogenized and not ideal for producing a quantity of cream.

Organic means less toxins, more nutrient rich food, and no GMOs or irradiation. Regeneratively farmed means healthier soil that produces healthier food.

Heavy cream – You could use only heavy cream, but I prefer to make it just a tiny bit lighter by using part half and half too. You could also use milk in place of the half and half.

Half and half – Part of the panna cotta base. You can also use either more cream or replace it with milk.

Whey, clabber, or buttermilk – This will be your starter culture for clabbering the cream. If you have a sourdough, you can also use it, but I would not use it straight up. Here is what to do: Add 1 tbsp sourdough to 1 pint of milk. Let it sit for about 24-48 hours or till thick. Once it’s thick, strain it through a piece of cloth and use that whey to culture the cream for Panna Cotta.

Raw honey – Raw, unfiltered honey makes a great sweetener for panna cotta and it has so many health benefits besides. Try to avoid honey from commercial farming areas that use pesticides on their fields, because it will be in your honey. But otherwise local honey from where you live, is the best to use for health.

Beef gelatin – Beef gelatin has such important health benefits and it will give your Cranberry sauce and salad the perfect consistency.

About beef gelatin: It is hard to find gelatin from grass-fed and -finished (100% grass fed) beef. All others would have been fed grain and if it doesn’t say organic, most likely the beef would have been, at least in part, given GMO grain in feedlots.

I’m hoping to make my own gelatin soon, but at the moment I use purchased gelatin.

I’m most excited about gelatin from this company I found. Here is a link to US Wellness Meats, a Missouri based company that offers clean gelatin and a lot of other clean meat products from regeneratively farmed, pastured, 100% grass-fed cattle. They also don’t use growth hormones, GMOs, or antibiotics. And the following is very important, since even organic cattle can be vaccinated, but US Wellness Meats does not use the mRNA vaccines. I contacted them about their grazing practices and asked whether they use pesticides on the pastures or hay, and here is the response I received: “All of our cattle are 100% grass-fed and grass finished. They rotationally graze on regenerative farms that are free from herbicides, pesticides, glyphosate, and insecticides.”

Here is their website statement: For over 25 years, US Wellness Meats has been proudly owned and operated by dedicated family farms. Our mission is simple: deliver nutrient-rich, 100% grass-fed and pasture-raised meats from farms that are cleaner, greener, and truly sustainable. Our animals are never given added growth hormones, GMOs, or antibiotics—just pure, wholesome meat raised the way nature intended.

I highly recommend them for all your beef product needs and for their clean, grass-fed gelatin.

If you want to buy from Amazon, this gelatin is the the closest to clean and natural that I could find, but it comes from Brazilian cows. On their website they state that it has been tested glyphosate free, no hormones, antibiotics, pesticides, or GMOs.

Cold milk – This will be used to bloom the gelatin and to dissolve it.

Flavorings

Vanilla extract
Lemon zest (optional)
Almond extract (optional)

For The Berry Sauce

Organic raspberries – fresh or frozen. Substitute with blackberries, blueberries, strawberries, peaches, cherries, plums or other fruit in season or from the freezer. With some fruits it would help to add a teaspoon of lemon juice too if they are very sweet, but raspberries are usually pretty tart already. I strongly urge anyone to buy organic raspberries.

I have lived in commercial raspberry and blueberry country for a long time and they dust their berries even during harvesting with crop dusters. I’d go to work in the morning and the planes were flying, throwing nasty smelling dust on the plants. On the way home from work the fields were full of workers harvesting berries.

Honey – You’ll need more or less depending on the sweetness of the berries. Mine were frozen and very tart. So I added a bit more honey, just taste your sauce and adjust before serving.

Instructions For Making Probiotic Panna Cotta

Make The Panna Cotta

Mix the heavy cream and half and half in a 2 quart saucepan. (Don’t follow my lead, lol. I used a 1 quart saucepan and it was a bit difficult to stir without making a mess)

Heat to 85 degrees and add the whey, clabber, buttermilk, or other starter culture (see tips and substitutions). Use a wire whisk or spoon to mix it well. Put a lid on it and set it in a warm corner (70-80 degrees) to clabber.

I made mine on a hot day and it was ready after 8 hours, but for the best health benefits, you’ll want to ferment it for a full 24 hours. (It does continue to ferment even after it’s congealed in the refrigerator, so I still got a full ferment when I was eating them a day after pouring it into molds).

When you’re ready to make the Panna Cotta, add the cold milk to a 1 cup stainless steel measuring cup or a small stainless steel bowl. 

Sprinkle the gelatin into the milk to bloom.

While waiting for the gelatin to bloom, heat your clabber to about body temperature while stirring on very low flame. Then take the pot off the heat and add the honey, vanilla, and almond extracts to the clabbered cream and whisk it in.

After about 5 minutes when the gelatin has bloomed, place the cup or bowl on the stove and heat till the gelatin is dissolved. Don’t overheat it or the gelatin will not gel properly. It needs to be just a little warmer than body temperature.

Once the gelatin is dissolved, whisk it into the warm clabbered cream. Stir for a few minutes to make sure it’s evenly distributed. 

Prepare your molds by either rinsing in cold water, or greasing them lightly. If you’ll be serving it in glasses with a spoon, you don’t need to rinse or grease them.

Pour the clabbered cream mix into the forms. Cover and place into the refrigerator to chill and set for 4 hours or longer. 

To unmold, dip the bottom of the forms in hot (not boiling) water for about 15-30 seconds. This will help release the filling. Invert onto a serving plate and add your favorite topping. 

You can also pour sauce onto a plate and invert the Panna Cotta onto another small plate or a bench knife that you rinse with cold water first. Then carefully slide it on top of the sauce while trying to avoid splashing. This can be a bit challenging, so it’s best to have a few extras on hand in case one or two mess up. They are just as delicious if they are messed up, so I love having extras for treats anyway.  

Make The Berry Sauce

Put the berries into a widemouth pint jar.

Add the honey.

Blend with an immersion blender till smooth.

Pour onto plates and set the Panna Cotta molds on top, or pour a layer or the sauce on top of the Panna Cotta in the glasses for spooning out.

Decorate with some berries or white or dark chocolate curls, edible flowers, lemon balm leaves, etc. and serve immediately. Enjoy! 

Storage

Since this is a cultured product, the Panna Cottas will be good in the fridge for about a week. But they’ll just get a bit more tangy over time. They do need to stay refrigerated for storage, but they’ll be fine left out for a few hours as long as hot weather doesn’t melt them. They’ll just ferment a little more.

How To Serve Probiotic Panna Cotta

You can pour the panna cotta into glasses and chill. Once firm, top with berry sauce or other topping for spoon-eating. In this case, you can use ½ teaspoon less of the gelatin powder for a creamier, less stiff, panna cotta. If you need to transport your panna cotta, this would be a good option. For parties, just fill the panna cotta into those 9 oz clear plastic party cups.

Pour the Panna Cotta into molds that you rinse with cold water or grease very lightly. Chill for at least 4 hours. Then dip the molds in warm water for half a minute and un-mold to serve. 

You can either pour sauce on the plate and set the Panna Cotta on top, or just unmold the Panna Cotta onto a plate and pour some sauce over and around it, or top with fruit or a spoonful of saucy jam or fruit butter. 

Some more topping ideas

Serve in Glasses with a layer of berry sauce, a syrup of your choice, chocolate sauce, or lemon curd.

Pour caramel sauce or cajeta over it.

Serve with white or dark chocolate fudge, a dollop of nutella, peach curd and peach slices or a peach sauce, cherries, blueberries, raspberries, strawberries or plums. Keep the fruit fresh and plain or chop and macerate with a spoonful of sugar, or blend with honey and optional lemon juice as I do in the recipe. You could also make a cooked berry sauce instead, with a teaspoon full of arrowroot flour stirred in to thicken. 

Theme ideas: 

For Christmas, use a cranberry, strawberry or raspberry sauce, or my super awesome, healthy cranberry orange raisin sauce.

For Valentine’s day: Raspberry or strawberry sauce or just fresh raspberries. You can also macerate fresh berries for half an hour with a spoonful of sugar and pour over the Panna Cotta with the juices.

Fourth of July: surround the Panna Cotta with blueberries and raspberries or strawberries. You could also make a blueberry and raspberry sauce by mixing the berries with a little lemon juice, a spoonful of sugar and a spoonful of arrowroot flour. Cook for a few minutes till thick, cool, pour the two sauces on a plate and set the Panna Cotta on top. 

You can also make a big Panna Cotta in a rectangular or round dish, chill, and pour the sauces in stripes over the Panna Cotta, leaving some white exposed for that tricolor effect. 

For Birthday Parties: Serve in a shallow dish like a pie with or without crust, or in a rectangular dish, with seasonal toppings, a fruit glaze (blood orange, lemon spirulina, berry, pomegranate…) and whipped cream, chocolate curls, edible flowers, sprinkles etc. 

Easter: Add pastel colors (beet powder, blue spirulina, spinach powder) Serve on a bed of natural shredded coconut, dyed with spinach powder. Ok, this one might be far-fetched. It’s just an idea, lol!

Your Questions Answered

Enjoy This Delicious Healthy Probiotic Panna Cotta

I am certain that you will love this dessert! It’s quick and easy to make, tastes delicious and it looks so festive when served with a beautifully colored berry sauce. You can make it any time of the year with either fresh or frozen berries. But it makes a really fancy probiotic dessert for your holiday meals, or special occasions like Valentine’s Day. It can help improve digestion with gut-healthy probiotics and provide immune support during the sick season. What’s not to love?! 

Have you made this recipe? I’d love to get your feedback and your ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ rating! And I’d love to hear your favorite ideas for serving Panna Cotta. And please don’t hesitate to ask in the comments if you have any questions!

Join the Food For Life Garden Community for more great recipes and homestead tips and ideas. I’m always adding new content. Don’t miss any new posts and learn more about my off-grid farm life.

Other Recipes You Might Like

Healthy Cranberry Orange Salad Or Sauce – The ultimate, incredibly delicious, cranberry sauce or molded salad to serve as a side with Holiday dinners. It’s great for dessert too served with probiotic Panna Cotta.

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Zimtsterne – Cinnamon stars are classic Southern German Christmas cookies. Delicious, gluten-free, and with a healthier option that actually tastes fantastic.

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Immersion blender
2 quart pot
9 oz clear plastic party cups
Singular Prep Bowls
Honey
Gelatin – from Amazon
Gelatin – from US Wellness Meats
Vanilla extract
Almond extract