How to make sour cream from milk at home?

Sour cream is a popular dairy product that can be used in every home. This product is best known as an ingredient for many dishes, giving them a unique taste, but among its properties there are other ways of offering benefits - for example, sour cream is used in traditional medicine.

At the same time, all the benefits of the product are due to its 100% naturalness, which recently cannot be said about store products, which are sinning with a large number of additives of dubious origin, and manufacturers are not always ready to admit out loud that their product is not quite real. It is for this reason that many people are ready to recall the previously popular skills of home-made sour cream. There is really nothing difficult in this - you just need to know the technology and strictly observe it.

The trick of factory manufacturers of dairy products is already visible, if only because BJU (an indicator of the content of proteins, fats and carbohydrates) for home-made sour cream is indicated separately and is approximately standard, whereas for canned sour cream these indicators can vary significantly depending on the manufacturer.

It is no secret that sour cream is not a product that promotes weight loss, but people who want to build a diet correctly, accurate figures are important - knowing them, you can eat anything, if only in moderation. Sour cream belongs to products with a huge fat content - this component makes up about a quarter of its whole mass, and only 100 grams of this product can provide about a third of the body's daily fat requirements. Compared to fats, proteins and carbohydrates are relatively small - 2.8 and 3.6 grams per 100 grams of sour cream, respectively.

As for the nutritional value of this product, then only a hundred grams of homemade sour cream contains about 255 kilocalories. For fragile girls, strictly keeping their body shape, just half a cup of this product themselves could prove to be a full-fledged snack, therefore, in no way should one abuse sour cream.

There are many options for self-preparation of sour cream at home, but in modern urban conditions, where people do not have a full-fledged farm, it is most often made from ordinary milk. As the main ingredient, preference is recommended to give to village cow's milk, but if there is none, then the option with the store product is acceptable, provided that the manufacturer is proven and does not slip the chemistry instead of the natural product. For a sufficient amount of ready-made cream, milk is usually taken three liters.

To cook sour cream at home, you need cream, because the first thing you need is to get them out of the milk. Step-by-step recipe looks like. First you need to warm the milk, and if it is homemade, then even boil it - so it will be possible to sterilize it to eliminate any contagion. On fire, the milk is kept no longer than 10 minutes, and the fire power is set at the minimum as soon as the liquid begins to boil.

Sterilized milk should be allowed to cool slightly, after which it is poured into plastic or glass dishes, but not sealed, but only wrapped with a thick towel or tightly covered with a thick napkin. The vessel is placed in a warm, but not illuminated place by the sun, so that the milk is sour - usually enough for 48 hours of exposure. In the absence of a really warm place, the deadlines may be delayed up to five days.

When milk is sour to the desired degree, the difference between the two layers will become visually noticeable. After that, you need to prepare a vessel of a suitable size, set a colander in it, and, in turn, cover it in several layers with gauze to drain the sour milk. Given the considerable thickness of the cream, the process of draining the liquid can be very long and last for an hour and a half - this point should be taken into account when choosing both a vessel for settling milk and a vessel for filtering. The finished cream should be a fairly thick mass, in which the liquid is only a small percentage.

To turn the cream into sour cream, you just need to beat them well with a blender. In this case, the density of the mass may be, in the opinion of cooking, excessive - in this case, you just need to add fresh milk to taste. In order for sour cream to finally become ready for use, after beating it must be tightly closed in an airtight container and sent to the refrigerator for half an hour.

The above recipe involves the preparation of sour cream exclusively from milk without using any leaven, but it can also be used - then the result will be achieved faster. Since self-preparation of sour cream is due to the desire to verify the naturalness of the product, store sourdough should be discarded - ordinary kefir will work fine instead. On average, only four spoons of this fermented milk product will be enough for a liter of milk.

In this case, the procedure will be somewhat more complicated. As in the previous recipe, the milk should first be boiled for sterilization, although if the choice fell on the ultrapasteurized store milk, you can not boil the liquid, limiting it to relatively little heat. The bottom line is that for the active reproduction of fermented milk bacteria that are already present in kefir and help sour the rest of the milk, a temperature of about 40 degrees is required.

If there is no thermometer at hand, it doesn’t matter - you can touch the correct condition, because the indicated temperature is just a few degrees higher than the temperature of the human body, so milk will feel to the touch hardly warm, but definitely not cool. Mix the heated milk with kefir, shake or mix the mixture thoroughly, wrap it in a thick cloth and send to a warm dark place for about 8 hours.

In the case of sour cream without sourdough, the product would be practically ready after straining, but the preparation with sourdough is slightly different. After 8 hours of infusion in a warm place, the acidified milk from the jar is poured into a colander, first lining it with several layers of gauze, but since the raw material insisted much less, it still needs to get to its condition. To do this, cover the colander, and together with all the contents sent to the refrigerator for another 8 hours. In the process, not only is it not forbidden, but it is recommended to interfere with the mass several times - so the liquid whey will drain faster, leaving the cream in its pure form.

After settling in the refrigerator, you get almost ready sour cream - you just have to whip it with a blender and tweak the consistency by adding a little milk. Ready-made sour cream, prepared with sourdough, should be kept in the fridge for another night before use - this will help to “put down” the sourdough and slow down the process of further souring of the product.

In urban conditions, it is not easy to get real village milk, and in a supermarket, the risk of running into a tasty but not very natural product is too great. However, craftsmen came up with a way to make homemade sour cream, even from such a product, although the main raw materials still need to choose as carefully as possible.Predicted, in addition to milk, for this recipe will need other ingredients - so, you should stock another 300 g of oil with 8% fat, as well as 2-3 tablespoons of purchased sour cream.

The authors of the recipe claim that the output will get sour cream about 40-45% fat, and the loss in weight compared to the ingredients will not.

The selected oil should be, if possible, natural, since it is the duty to give the questionable dairy product fat and typical dairy ingredients. It is cut in small pieces and left on the table for some time to soften it. After that, the butter is mixed with milk and, in this form, they begin to heat over low heat, stirring constantly, so that the cubes do not burn. It is not necessary to bring the liquid to a temperature at which the cubes will melt completely - it is assumed that in warm milk they will reach standard condition even when the plate is turned off.

The resulting mixture is sufficient to blend with a blender for several minutes at full power, so that the mass is somewhat thickened and turned into cream. To the received cream add the prepared purchased sour cream, which here acts as a starter, after which the vessel with the mixture is wrapped in a thick towel or blanket and put in a warm and dark place to stand. The exact time that you need to wait until ready, depends on the temperature in the room and the quality of the starter - usually you have to wait from 6 to 12 hours, so the authors of the recipe recommend periodically looking into the container, assessing the readiness of sour cream.

Goat milk in our country is relatively rare, but you can always say with certainty that it is natural, and most importantly - it is much easier to make sour cream out of it at home than from cow milk.

The process will be extremely simple if the farm has a special separator for milk. The raw material is given for several hours so that it will settle at average room temperature in a vessel covered with gauze - thanks to this, a mushroom will appear in the milk. Sucked milk must be heated to about 35-38 degrees (the temperature of the liquid will be felt to the touch as normal - the milk will seem neither hot nor cold).

Warm water is preliminarily passed through the separator so that the device acquires the same temperature as the milk and then the main raw material is passed through it. An almost ready sour cream will flow out of the device, which can only be allowed to ripen - for this, it stays for another 24 hours in a warm place, safely sheltered from the sun's rays, and then sent to the refrigerator. In the cold, it should thicken slightly, and when this happens, the product is ready for use.

In the absence of a separator, the procedure looks even simpler, although it takes more time. The ideal goat milk for such a product would be the same goat milk, only previously sour. Fresh milk with a small admixture of the soured is left for several days in a warm place, not closing hermetically, but only covering the container with gauze. When a characteristic thick layer appears on the surface of the liquid, it must be drained in any convenient way - this is ready-made sour cream.

For many modern people, this miracle appliance literally replaces the entire kitchen as a whole and is a true embodiment of the mechanization of culinary art. It will not disappoint those who wanted homemade sour cream - the slow cooker will help to cook it too. Another thing is that the process will have to use ready-made dairy ingredients - this is sour cream with a fat content of 20% and natural yogurt, both components in the amount of 150 grams per liter of fresh milk. Be prepared for the fact that your favorite device will be busy all night.

First, milk should be heated in a slow cooker to a temperature of about 40 degrees - it is optimal for the rapid growth of the lactic acid bacteria population.For this purpose, any program from the pre-set ones will be suitable, the most important criterion here is precisely temperature compliance, otherwise the taste of the final product may turn out to be unpredictable. In the warmed milk should pour the remaining two ingredients and thoroughly stir the mass until smooth - a blender in this case will not interfere. After this, in the heating mode, the resulting mass should be heated for a quarter of an hour.

Traditionally, the most popular raw material for making sour cream is whole or baked milk, but it also happens that these ingredients are not on hand, but there are other dairy products that we would like to replace with sour cream. The beauty of "milk" lies in the fact that it can be very freely "convert" from one state to another.

In the process of making sour cream from milk, the raw material necessarily goes through a stage of transformation into cream, so if the latter are already in stock, the procedure becomes much simpler and, most importantly, reduced in time. However, the cream is not suitable for any - for a good result, it is required that their fat content be at least 10%. To speed up the ripening process, they use sourdough in the form of ready-made sour cream - about two tablespoons of such sourdough are required for half a liter of cream.

The main raw material and leaven must be thoroughly mixed, after which the product is left in a dark place at room temperature for a period of one and a half days, but in practice it strongly depends on the room temperature.

Yogurt maker is a container that allows you to maintain a consistently high temperature inside for a long time, which allows you to stabilize and speed up the process of fermentation of fermented milk products. As a raw material for making sour cream in a yoghurt maker, homemade or purchased cream is usually used; You can, of course, start with milk, but then the process will be very long.

If pasteurized cream is bought, then they do not need preliminary sterilization, otherwise the main ingredient must be boiled first and then allowed to cool to about 40 degrees. Remember that the fat content of the cream depends on the fat content of the cream.

The meaning of making sour cream in a yogurt maker is that you can do it quite quickly in this way, so you shouldn’t refuse the starter too. As such, both purchased (sold both in supermarkets and in some pharmacies), and ryazhenka with fat content of 4% or homemade yoghurt may be appropriate. If the choice fell on the powder purchased leaven, you should carefully read the instructions for it. Experienced manufacturers of homemade sour cream argue that it is better to dilute the powder in the entire volume of the cream at once, but first mix the quality with a small amount of liquid, which is then mixed with the main part of the preform.

Some yogurt makers have built-in sour cream preparation, and if you are so lucky, you need to choose it. If there is none, you will have to choose another similar mode, and the duration of exposure for sour cream is usually 7-8 hours.After this period has expired, the finished liquid should be drained from the yogurt maker and allowed to stand in the refrigerator for about an hour, after which the desired product is ready.

A common raw material for making homemade sour cream is not only fresh milk, but also another popular milk drink, kefir. Each liter of such raw materials provides approximately two glasses of finished sour cream, but it should be remembered that the quantity and quality of the final product strongly depends on how much fatty kefir was chosen.

A huge plus in the choice of kefir as a raw material for making sour cream is that this recipe does not provide for any difficulties at all. In fact, kefir is sour cream, only very diluted, because the task of the person preparing the sour cream is to separate the latter from the whey. For this purpose, a colander should be inserted into a large vessel, which, in turn, is lined with several layers of gauze.

Since kefir is already a lactic acid product, additional heating is not required for it - on the contrary, it is necessary to put the container with it in the refrigerator, where its fat content will be able to thicken. It will take about 6-8 hours to complete this task. After the indicated time has elapsed, a significantly thickened substance will be found in gauze, which, in fact, is sour cream - it doesn’t even need to be kept in a refrigerator before use, because it is already just there.

The recipes for making sour cream seem extremely simple, and this fact sums the majority of people who are just starting to experiment with homemade lactic acid products. The fact is that there are relatively few small details in such recipes, but they play a decisive role, whereas beginners who are confident in the simplicity of the task simply do not pay attention to minor reservations. In order not to disappoint the result, we will give a few popular tips that solve the main problems:

• If you have the opportunity to buy natural milk in the village, especially from personally familiar people, it would be best to do just that. You can sterilize the product by ordinary boiling, but you will definitely be sure that it is natural and does not contain any harmful chemistry that modern manufacturers so fond of abusing.
• Many newcomers, whose first sour cream turned out to be too liquid, are worried about how to make it thicker. Theoretically, a product can be kept for a longer time at the souring stage, but it will not bring a fundamentally changed result.

• It happens that homemade sour cream acquires a completely uncharacteristic for itself and at the same time not very pleasant taste - for example, bitter taste. This happens especially with sour cream made from goat milk - it is very demanding to comply with exact temperature indicators, and inappropriate bitterness indicates that the place chosen for ripening was not warm enough. Excessively sour taste indicates the opposite - the chosen place turned out to be too hot. The metallic taste, most likely, will give the reason for its appearance with the head - the contact of milk and dairy products with any metal utensils is highly undesirable.
• Sour cream can be made from pure milk, but if you need to do it quickly, you will have to look for additional ingredients. The easiest way to speed up the process is to use sourdough in the form of a small admixture of ready-made dairy product, for example, yogurt.Alternatively, you can add a few spoons of sugar to the mass. Without being leaven, it will be an ideal tool for the rapid growth of a colony of lactic acid bacteria, and even give an unusual deep flavor.

Learn more about how to make sour cream at home, you will learn from the following video.