Friday, May 15, 2009

Food on Fridays- May 15 - Homemade Sour Cream



Sour Cream may not always be cost effective to make your own. For myself I will have to do a bit more research on the price of heavy cream and half & half cream.

Just a quick look at one grocery store today, I learned that a 2 pint heavy cream (16 oz) was 99 cents and a 16 oz sour cream was also 99 cents. Same amount for the same price, but then a couple of cents worth of buttermilk culture goes into the cream would make home made more expensive, not even taking into consideration the time and effort you would have to spend in making it.

But that was one of the more expensive stores, I went there because the pork they had was a really good buy. And I really like their meat department.

On to making home made Sour Cream-

It was a load of fun and tasty too.

I made 3 kinds all using my favorite buttermilk as the culture. You can also substitute sour cream as the culture. The recipe is as follows:

* 1 cup heavy cream
* 1/4 cup buttermilk or sour cream

Mix cream and buttermilk in a glass bottle, cover and let stand at room temperature about 24 hours until very thick. Chill well in refrigerater after thickened and before using. Makes 1 cup.

Again, Easy Peasy.











  1. The left bottle was made with a mixture of equal parts of half & half and heavy cream.
  2. The middle one was made with half and half.
  3. the right bottle was made with heavy cream.

They all turned out really great. The one made with heavy cream tastes wonderful but was almost solid when it was chilled. You can see the differences in the above photo. The one made from half & half and heavy cream was more the consistency of my store bought sour cream. And it tastes wonderful, too. The final one made with half & half was very soft, a little runny, but again it tastes like sour cream.


I tried a baked potato with store bought sour cream and all three of my homemade sour creams made from the buttermilk culture. I can only say- yum!! I don't know if any one was better than the other, my potato tasted awesome.

So, in order to make this cost effective, you have to get your cream at a lesser price than store bought sour cream.


I have also made two samples using sour cream as the culture. One made with heavy cream that turned out great and the other with half & half that was also delicious.






You can see in the photos that the one made with heavy cream and sour cream culture is very stiff. The one with half & half is softer and a bit runny. It is trying to escape the bottle.







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Return to Ann's Blog for the Food on Fridays carnival and find more posts that might be anything remotely related to food.

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4 comments:

  1. Yes I'm sure this is yum with a baked potato! Thanks for posting this idea :)

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  2. I can't wait to try it. Thanks so much for posting your experiments - you had some great photos!

    I've just got to be believe that the homemade sour cream HAS to taste so much better than the store bought stuff.

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  3. Sounds easy! And yummy
    I'm gonna link to it:)

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  4. Do you have to use a glass bottle? Can it be plastic?

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