How to make sour cream at home: recipes and cooking secrets. Arguments in favor of homemade sour cream - for! How to make sour cream at home

Homemade sour cream is undoubtedly much healthier and tastier than store-bought! It’s not at all difficult to make, but you need to know that not all milk is suitable for these purposes. If you want to make real homemade sour cream, then take the time to find milk that has not been factory processed. So, now we will tell you how to prepare healthy and tasty sour cream at home.

Homemade sour cream

Ingredients:

  • cream 35% – 1 tbsp.;
  • milk – 1 l;
  • drinking – 2 tbsp. spoons.

Preparation

If you don’t have cream, take a can of milk and put it in the refrigerator for about 20 hours. After time, you will see the cream rise to the top. Carefully remove them with a spoon and place in a separate bowl. Your further actions will depend on what kind of sour cream you want to get as a result. You can simply put the cream in the refrigerator, and it will harden, turning into a sweetish dense mass. Or you can add a little yogurt to them and mix everything thoroughly. Then place the container in any warm place and leave for about 6–8 hours. After this, lightly beat the fermented milk product with a mixer at the lowest speed and put it in the refrigerator. The longer homemade sour cream from cream sits in a cool place, the tastier and thicker it will turn out.

Homemade sour cream from milk

Ingredients:

  • store-bought milk – 300 ml;
  • – 300 g;
  • sour cream – 3 tbsp. spoons.

Preparation

To make sour cream at home, take butter, cut it into pieces and put it in a saucepan. Let it sit at room temperature for a while until it softens. Then pour in the milk, put it on medium heat and, stirring constantly, melt the butter. Now pour the mixture into the blender bowl and turn it on at full power for 3 minutes. Add store-bought sour cream to the prepared warm cream, mix and pour the mixture into a thermos or a jar, which we wrap in a warm blanket. Leave this structure in a warm place for about 10 hours. After the time has passed, transfer the sour cream into a container and put it in the refrigerator to mature overnight. You can regulate its fat content by changing the ratio of products. Remember that the longer it sits in a warm place, the more sour it becomes. As you can see, making sour cream at home is not at all difficult, the main thing is that you have your desire!

A simple recipe for homemade sour cream

Ingredients:

  • milk – 3 l.

Preparation

We take plain store-bought milk - the cheapest. Then pour it into a saucepan, heat it until warm and carefully pour it into a plastic decanter. We cover it with a thick napkin on top, tie it tightly and put the workpiece in a warm place to sour and settle naturally. Usually this takes 2 days, and in winter, in cold weather - 5 days. During the souring process, do not shake or stir the drink. After the specified period of time, you will see that the whey will settle at the bottom and fill about a quarter of the jar. Next, put a colander on a wide plate, line it with thick gauze and pour our risen milk onto it. Let it sit and drain off all the whey. When it has completely drained, after 1.5 hours, you will see a jelly-like mass. Transfer it to a bowl and beat thoroughly with a blender. If you want to get watery sour cream as a result, then add a little milk and mix until smooth. Place the whipped sour cream in a container, close the lid and put it in the refrigerator for half an hour.

Homemade sour cream, its taste has been known to me since childhood, because I grew up in a village in the south of Ukraine and my parents always kept a cow to feed a large family in Khrushchev’s times. Mom always made it from sour milk, heated it in a Russian stove in clay jugs, and then strained it through cheesecloth.

What kind of cottage cheese it was!!! Nowadays you rarely see one like this even on the market. So, before sending the jugs into the oven, they always removed the top layer that formed in the jugs - this was real homemade sour cream. Tender, with a slight sourness and unique taste.

Now, you go to the market and ask for sour cream, and they offer you cream skimmed from fresh milk. And in supermarkets it’s generally a disaster, there is almost no natural sour cream, everything is powdered or with the addition of Yeshek.

For Easter baking, you need natural sour cream, homemade, so that the cake is tender and tasty. In urban conditions, sour cream can be made from cream, homemade milk with natural starters.

Today I offer several ways to make homemade sour cream:

Homemade sour cream with cream and kefir

We need:

  • 300 -350 ml cream 20%
  • 100 g kefir (yogurt without sugar or additives)

Preparation:

1.Pour the cream into a jar, add kefir to it, stir until smooth and leave in a warm place for 12 hours.

If you do this in the evening, the sour cream will be ready in the morning. Place the sour cream in the refrigerator.

Homemade sour cream with fresh milk cream


1st option

This method requires a lot of milk, at least 3 liters of peasant milk.

We need:

  • 3 liters of homemade milk
  • 100 g peasant sour cream, for sourdough (Some recipes give the following proportion: 1 tbsp sour cream for every 250 ml of milk)

Preparation:

1. Peasant milk should be selected with high fat content. We make sure that there is a clear division in the container where milk is sold into cream and milk. The thicker the ball of cream, the fattier the milk.

2. Sour cream for sourdough is initially needed, peasant sour cream, store-bought may also be suitable, but you need to read its composition so that it is more natural, without starch.

3. The milk should stand for a while so that the cream rises to the top of the container, and then remove this layer into the jar. Add sour cream to the cream, stir until smooth, and leave in a warm place for 5 hours. Then mix and refrigerate for 12 hours.

4. After we look at the consistency of the sour cream, if it has not thickened too much, mix it again, put it in a warm place, and continue as before. The cycle for making sour cream is 2 days.

2nd option

We use 1 liter of homemade milk.

We need:

  • 1 liter of peasant homemade milk

Preparation:

1. The milk must be strained through cheesecloth and boiled.

2. Pour the boiled milk into a jar, being careful not to crack the jar (insert a spoon into the jar and then remove it). To prevent a film from forming on top, cover the jar with a lid. As the milk cools, condensation will form on it, carefully remove it so that it does not get into the milk.

3. Place the can of milk in the refrigerator overnight. In the morning, take it out and leave it to sour at room temperature. After the milk has soured, remove the top layer - this is sour cream.

Homemade sour cream with Vivo sourdough

Vivo starters are live and beneficial bacteria, dried in a special way, and packaged in jars for better preservation. Once in warm milk, bacteria come to life, live and multiply, increasing in number.

The products obtained as a result of the use of sourdough do not have harmful impurities, are distinguished by freshness, pleasant taste and thick consistency.

Using Vivo starters, you can prepare yogurt, kefir, sour cream and cottage cheese at home based on milk (cow, goat, almond, soy) and cream.

We need:

1st method: with milk

  • 1 liter of high fat milk (6%) or homemade milk up to 4% fat
  • 1 bottle of starter for sour cream - VIVO sour cream, with this amount of starter you can ferment up to 3 liters of milk.

Preparation:

1. Homemade or pasteurized milk must be boiled and cooled to 37 - 40 degrees. If we use ultra-pasteurized, just warm it up.

2. If we use 1 liter of milk from a bottle with starter, you need to pour 1/3 of it into a glass, pour in lukewarm milk, mix thoroughly and add to the rest of the milk, also mixing.

3. The resulting mixture can be left in the pan, or you can immediately pour it into a jar, cover with a lid and wrap it in a blanket, a warm towel, or generally something warm. Place the jar in a warm, draft-free place for 6-8 hours for fermentation.

4. Then, check whether the product has thickened or not; if it has not yet thickened much, leave it under warm for another 2 hours, check again. Store the finished product in the refrigerator for up to 5 days.

The full taste of sour cream will be revealed only after a day of storage in the refrigerator, although you can eat it immediately.

2nd method: with cream

We need:

  • 0.5 ml cream 20%
  • 1/3 bottle of starter

Preparation: mix the cream with the dissolved starter, mix and place in a warm place, having previously wrapped the jar. We stand for up to 10 hours.

Kefir sour cream

We need:

  • 0.5 l - 1 l kefir 2.5%, in a bag

Preparation:

1. Place the kefir packet in the freezer overnight.

2. Prepare a saucepan, a colander and multi-layer gauze or nylon fabric, it is denser than gauze. After removing the package of kefir from the freezer, cut the package, place the contents in a colander, and leave at room temperature to defrost.

During the melting process, the whey will flow into the bowl, and the sour cream will remain on the gauze. Afterwards, put the sour cream in a bowl. The whey can be used to make yeast-free pies.

Products in our stores continue to gradually increase in price. And what you could easily afford to buy before is no longer so affordable today. Dairy products, like everyone else, are also not lagging behind in this “price race,” although they have never been particularly cheap. But dairy products are the main ones for many. Today we will talk about sour cream, or rather about how you can make homemade sour cream. It is clear that it cannot be made from water. It should also be based on milk, or another product, but again made from milk. We will make our homemade sour cream from cream.

We make homemade sour cream from cream. Simple recipe

So, if you prepare sour cream from cream, then in the end you can also save about 30 - 40 percent of the cost of this delicious fermented milk product. To do this you will need to purchase cream. A half-liter pack will be enough, but the fat content of the cream should be from 10 percent. The fat content may be higher, but 10% is the lowest level.

Next, you will need to add two tablespoons of ordinary sour cream to the cream. You mix this whole simple composition with an ordinary spoon and then leave it alone for a day, maybe a day and a half. There is no need to put our future sour cream in the refrigerator; just let it stand in your room, at natural temperature, which is exactly what is needed in this case. But after the lactic acid bacteria have done their “work” and this composition has already turned into real sour cream, then you can put it in the refrigerator.

In taste and consistency, sour cream made from cream is not at all inferior to the one you buy in stores. Here you will also be able to save money, because buying cream will be much cheaper than sour cream.

Another important point to remember when you decide to prepare yourself another portion of homemade sour cream. In the next package of cream, during the second preparation, you will need to put your own product as a starter, and not store-bought sour cream.

But in this short video, they will tell you another option for making homemade sour cream. Here they already make it from milk. Let's see.

In urban areas, homemade sour cream is rarely prepared. But in vain. This is not difficult to do. It is enough to buy milk, let it brew, skim off the risen milk fat - cream, ferment it and let it stand for a short time.

The method and time of preparation of this dairy product with a characteristic sourness depends on the origin of the milk.

Milk

The most delicious sour cream, of course, comes from homemade milk. If you have the opportunity to purchase milk from a cow with a good reputation and reviews, and if you are sure that the animal is completely healthy, then choose this option. In this case, fresh milk does not need to be boiled.

It is also permissible not to boil milk purchased in a store. Choose a fresh, fatty product with a short shelf life.

If you bought milk at the market, then before making sour cream at home, be sure to boil it.

Sour cream from freshly milked milk

Pour the milk into a spacious bowl and place in a cool place. After about a day, the milk fat will rise, forming a small layer of cream.

Gently remove them and collect them in a separate container. Let it stand at room temperature for 2 hours, then add the sourdough starter: yogurt, kefir, sour yogurt or sour cream (1 tablespoon of starter is enough for 1 liter of cream). Stir and leave for a day.

The next day, place the container with the dairy product in a cool place (+5..+8 °C) and leave for 12 hours.

Sour cream made from natural milk bought at the market

The milk must boil for at least 1 minute. Cool it at natural temperature and transfer to a cool place.

After a day, skim off the resulting cream. In a kitchen with a temperature of +20 °C, add any fermented milk product to them and keep in this mode for 15-20 hours, stirring 2-3 times for the first 2 hours. Then move it to a cool room for 1 day.

Sour cream from store-bought milk

Thick, fatty sour cream from store-bought milk cannot be made without the help of a close “relative”. Butter will come to the rescue. For rich, hearty sour cream you will need:

  • 0.5 l of milk;
  • 0.5 kg butter;
  • 1 tablespoon of fermented milk starter (kefir, yogurt, sour cream).

You can adjust the fat content of sour cream yourself by reducing or adding the amount of butter.


High-quality sour cream should be thick, fresh in taste and have a uniform consistency.

Light sour cream

To prepare “quick” dishes, so-called “false sour cream” is often used. It is prepared very simply: add a couple of drops of lemon juice or citric acid to the cream. The cream quickly thickens, acquiring the taste and consistency of sour cream. They have no nutritional value, but the taste is quite pleasant.

There are now so many items in the assortment of sour cream that you can stand at the display case with the product for an hour, but still not fully understand which manufacturer to give an “excellent” rating, even if you already know what the difference is between sour cream and “smetanka”, “smetanova” ” and other similar word creation that hides the composition of the product with an affectionate and respectful inscription on the packaging.

What does sour cream consist of? In fact, half a century ago no one would have thought to ask such a question.

Sour cream - from the word “sweep away”. It’s clear what to skim and from what – cream from milk. But after technological progress made a leap forward in the dairy industry, sour cream is not only swept away, but extracted and even invented.

When it’s made from dairy products, it’s not so bad, but when it contains secret components of non-dairy origin, it becomes unsettling - deception is always unpleasant, generates enormous mistrust and causes a defensive reaction.

That’s why people are looking for sour cream from milk - a recipe at home. They are doing the right thing in what they are looking for.

There is a big difference between sour cream and a sour cream product stored in a display case for more than 72 hours. Even if a sour cream product has a pleasant taste and thick consistency, this taste cannot be called milky, and even if you blindfold a person and do not tell him what he is tasting, he will not detect the smell of cream.

Sour cream from milk - a recipe at home with basic technological principles of preparation

Let's first do a little math and compare in order to come to the correct conclusion about the economic feasibility of making sour cream from milk yourself. More on recipes for home use a little later.

950 ml of pasteurized natural milk (3.7%) from a good, well-known manufacturer costs 86.00 rubles. A jar of sour cream (25%), weighing 330 g, from the same manufacturer in the retail network costs 90.00 rubles. Total – 176.00 rubles. But this is only 950 ml of good milk and 330 g of sour cream.

We choose milk at the market. A 3 liter bottle should contain at least 350-400 ml of cream. You just need to choose the right milk. In a glass jar, kept for at least 8 hours, after evening milking, the line of separation of milk and cream is very clearly visible: the cream (the fatty part of the milk) floats to the top and its color is creamy, and the milk remains at the bottom, it is white. 350-400 ml of cream is approximately 1/5 of the bottle. In very good milk, especially in winter, there is noticeably more cream and in the same glass container it takes up 1/3 of the volume, up to 700 ml.

A liter of homemade milk costs on average 60.00 rubles, respectively, 3 liters - 180.00 rubles. That is, for almost the same money you can get more than two liters of good, whole milk, with a fat content of at least 10%, which, if desired, any housewife can dilute with water herself, and not pay money for it. To two liters of milk, as a bonus, comes 700 ml of cream, with a fat content of at least 25% - this practically equals 2 jars of sour cream, 330 g each, at a retail price, made by a good manufacturer of dairy products. And one more thing: even this good manufacturer does not indicate the composition of sour cream on the packaging, and how natural milk is sealed in a plastic bottle with a beautiful label can only be blindly trusted, especially if the buyer has long been unaccustomed to the taste of natural, non-powdered dairy products, or does not even remember his.

Well, how? Does it make sense to make your own sour cream from milk? The recipe at home is very simple. Perhaps someone remembers from childhood in the village how a grandmother uses a spoon to collect the cream from a can of milk that has collected on the surface of the milk after settling. Then this cream will sour on its own, and it will be added to borscht or served with pancakes with cottage cheese.

Later, manual separators appeared, then mechanical ones. Yes, it is impossible to make real sour cream without cream. This is the main difficulty of preparing it at home.

But, remembering the comparative cost of sour cream made from milk, a homemade recipe will immediately seem like a saving grace from the costs of packaging, advertising, transportation, and so on. For this occasion, you can even spend money on a household separator, which will pay for itself in a matter of months, especially if the family loves sour cream, cream, homemade butter and cheese. By the way, with the help of a separator you can adjust the fat content of cream and make sour cream with a fat content of 15%, 20%, 25% and up to 48%.

If you don’t have the money to buy a separator now, then start saving in the old grandfather’s, or rather, grandmother’s way. It’s a little troublesome, but apart from a spoon with a handle bent at an angle of 90 degrees, no equipment is required. Just skim off the settled cream with a spoon and transfer it to another jar, clean and dry.

One can, of course, argue that homemade milk is unsafe to consume, that in addition to beneficial bacteria and vitamins, it is full of pathogenic microorganisms. Yes, if you are not sure about the purchase, then the milk must be pasteurized, especially if it is intended for children. But does pasteurization really cost as much as the product itself, or is there no pot in the house to pasteurize it yourself? Many housewives now use multicookers. This is the ideal way to pasteurize milk. You just need to set the timer for 5-7 minutes and the temperature at 70°C. There is no need to warm it up any more, because the beneficial bacteria will die, and there will be nothing left of the vitamins.

On the Internet you can find many tips on how to make sour cream from milk, the fat content of which is 3.2%. But sour cream should have a sweet and sour creamy taste, and from milk, almost skim, you can only get good sour milk. At the very least, if you make sour cream from milk, the fat content should be at least 15%. Therefore, we will leave the recipes for yogurt until next time, and how to make sour cream from milk, read below in the recipes for home.

1. Sour cream from milk - recipe. At home we make sour cream in a rustic way (first method)

Compound:

    Cow's milk (evening) 3.0 l

    Sourdough - sour cream 6 tbsp. l.

Preparation:

We collect the cream from a bottle of fresh, unpasteurized milk. If possible, then place the jar of cream in the multicooker, after pouring a little water into it and laying a mat. Warm up at 35°C. We take out the jar and introduce the starter, at the rate of two tablespoons of previously prepared sour cream for each glass of collected cream. If you are making your own sour cream for the first time, then buy a jar of sour cream at the market, along with milk. You will only have to spend on it once. In the future, leave a few spoons of sour cream for fermenting the next portion.

Mix the added sour cream thoroughly with the cream. It is advisable to mix the mixture with a mixer for a few seconds at low speeds to thoroughly break up the fat globules and achieve a homogeneous, fluffy consistency. In production, the cream is homogenized by increasing the heating temperature to 60°C for 20-30 seconds. We are happy to adopt good technologies. Just don't overdo it so you don't end up with butter instead of sour cream. After 24 hours of aging at a temperature of 18-23oC (the ripening time also depends on the amount and activity of the starter introduced), transfer the sour cream into a sterile jar with a tight-fitting lid and put it in the refrigerator. You can store it for a week if you don’t eat it during that time.

2. Sour cream from milk - recipe. At home we make sour cream in a rustic way (second method)

Raw materials:

    Whole milk, homemade 3 l

Operating procedure:

The easiest way to make country sour cream does not require any preparation. In a bottle of fresh milk, in which the boundary between milk and cream has already been marked, put 5-6 tablespoons of sour cream to speed up the ripening. Preheat the milk together with the jar in a water bath. Place the jar in a warm place, near the stove, radiator, boiler. Wrap it in something warm and wait for it to sour. The jar should be kept slightly open to provide free access of air to the lactic acid bacteria (they also breathe). As soon as you notice that a dense clot has formed at the bottom and the whey has begun to separate, take a spoon, a clean sour cream jar and collect the sour cream from the surface of the curdled milk.

3. Sour cream from milk - recipe. We prepare a dietary product at home

Raw materials:

    Homemade skim milk (10%) 1 l

    Special starter (mesophilic) 5 g

    Dry cream (15%) 200 g

Preparation method:

The milk is pasteurized by heating to 70°C, cooled to 40°C and dry cream is added, with active stirring. The resulting normalized milk is left for 2-3 hours for the dry matter to swell, then heated again to 60°C, stirring with a mixer at low speeds: the centrifugal force creates pressure, as a result of which the fat globules are destroyed while simultaneously heating and this contributes to the formation of a uniform texture. Cool the milk to 20-23oC and add mesophilic starter. Stir again. Pour the milk into jars, close them and after 5-6 hours put the milk in the refrigerator.

4. Sour cream from milk - recipe. Making sour cream from goat's milk at home

Raw materials:

    Goat's milk, homemade

Preparation:

First, a short introduction. If cow's milk is a valuable product, then goat's milk is healing. It is perfectly absorbed by humans because its composition is suitable for enzymes that are involved in digestion. Goat milk contains antibiotics.

Its fats are smaller in size than cow's milk fats. But precisely because of the structure of proteins and fats, it is impossible to separate cream from goat milk without a separator. Therefore, for full-fat goat milk sour cream, it is necessary to have such a technique.

After separating the cream, it is heated to 45°C, then kept for a day at 23°C and cooled in the refrigerator.

Second way: to obtain sour cream from 2 liters of goat's milk, use homemade sour cream from cow's milk (100 g) or thermophilic starter culture (5% of the total volume). The milk is heated to 30-35 ° C, the starter is introduced and kept until thickened at room temperature, and then stored at 0 -6oC.

Sour cream from milk - recipe for home: useful tips and tricks

    If you add a little fresh milk to the sour cream, it will not curdle. This can be successfully used when serving it as a sauce for hot dishes.

    If sour cream needs to be whipped, for example, to prepare cream, then add egg white to it so that it becomes thick and acquires a stable consistency.