Wednesday, April 4, 2012

Sour cream and failure

I tried making sour cream again twice last week. Both times, it failed. I wasn't sure the first time if I'd messed up the measurements and that was the problem, since I had just guessed at the amounts from memory. So the second time, I did it by the book...and it still failed. So I had to wonder if it was the milk I was using. The last few times I've gone to the store, they were out of the local milk so I bought a different brand. I checked the milk we were using and it said "pasteurized" but not "ultra-pasteurized", so it should have been fine. Still, it wasn't working. So when I went shopping over the weekend I bought the last half-gallon of local milk from the store and tried sour cream for the third time. This time, it set beautifully.
Lesson learned. From now on, I will not be making home dairy products except with the local milk. And now we can finally make the moose stroganoff I've been pushing off for over a week since we didn't have any sour cream and I'm now refusing to buy something I can make so easily. :) Yum!

2 comments:

  1. hey there, Calamity from Apron Stringz. milk doesn't make sour cream, cream makes sour cream. were you using buttermilk to set it or a purchased culture? milk set with buttermilk is just more buttermilk (very good for cooking!), and even ultra pasteurized works for that. but it doesn't get thick like sour cream.
    a little buttermilk added to full on heavy cream makes sour cream though. or, i think it's technically "creme freiche" but, same difference ;) but either that or the milk to buttermilk need to set at a pretty warm temperature. the books say "room temperature" but i can tell you, i had trouble when we lived in alaska. our house was usually upper 60s. there is a big difference, bacterial-growth-wise between 68 and 75. very big. below 68, some of the "room temperature" stuff just doesn't seem to work.
    hope that was helpful and not annoying ;)

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