Learn How To Make Your Own Homemade Sour Cream

Making Sour Cream From Scratch With Live Active Cultures

Sour cream is a delicious thick cream that makes almost everything better! The good news is it’s really easy to make. It’s actually easier than making yogurt and making yogurt is pretty easy. When making any food that requires good bacteria, you need to use caution to prevent bad bacteria. Really, you need to prevent bad bacteria all the time, but it’s especially important for making anything with live active culture.

The Precautions You Need To Take While Making Homemade Sour Cream

The main concern is killing off all bacteria from any surface that will come in contact with your product. To do this, use boiling water and soak everything in it for a few minutes. Use tongs to pull out each item. This includes your measuring spoons, measuring cup, and the container you plan to store your sour cream in. If you plan to use mason jars, put your rings in the water as well. If you were going to do a canning process, you wouldn’t put the lids in the boiling water because it will damage the wax designed to seal the jars. Since you aren’t using these lids for a canning process, you can sterilize them as well.

An Easy Method For Making Sour Cream At Home

The Basics

For those who don’t want to waste time being a geek about this stuff, here’s the method for you. These instructions will assume you’ve already did the steps to sterilize your containers and utensils mentioned above. I’m only going to list the “food” ingredients you need to use. Take note that you’ll need to use a coffee filter, paper towel, or cheese cloth to cover each jar.

The Ingredients You’ll Need

Heavy Whipping Cream: You need to make sure you don’t buy the ultra-pasteurized cream. The normal pasteurized heavy whipping cream is what you want to use.

Cultured Buttermilk: You need to read the label and make sure you find the buttermilk that has “live active culture” in it. If you see “cultured” or “live active cultures” on the label or in the ingredients, you know you have the right stuff..

Let’s Get To Making Our Sour Cream!

Step One: Measure the heavy whipping cream as you place it in the jar you plan to use. Fill the jars about ¾ of the way from the top.

Step Two: Put 1.5 tablespoons of cultured buttermilk for each cup of heavy whipping cream you placed into the container. If you use 3 cups of cream, use 4.5 tablespoons of cultured buttermilk. Don’t stress on this too hard. You don’t want to change the flavor by adding too much buttermilk, but it’s hard to go wrong. You’re only using the buttermilk to extract the live active culture from it. Stir the mixture gently.

Step Three: Cover the jar with your choice of coffee filter, paper towel, or cheese cloth to prevent dust or other nasty things floating around in the air from getting into your mixture.

Step Four: Let the jars sit in a warm place for 18-24 hours. Ideally you want the jars to be in the mid-70’s (F) (23 C). This step is important to getting the right texture for your sour cream. It needs to be warm enough to activate the culture (good bacteria) and get them breeding.

Step Five: Put the lids on the jars and set them in the fridge for another 24 hours.

That’s it… after that you are ready to start eating your homemade sour cream.

How Do You Thicken Homemade Sour Cream?

If your sour cream is too thin, it’s likely you didn’t let it set out long enough during step four. The live active culture needs to do it’s thing. The best method to keep the texture as pleasurable as possible is to put a coffee filter or cheese cloth in a strainer and place your sour cream into it. Put the strainer in a larger bowl and set inside the fridge for day or two. This should help remove some of the whey and thicken things up for you. The best solution though is to make sure you give your buttermilk enough time to get the party started.

Here Are 3 Tips To Help Prevent Thin Sour Cream When Making Your Next Batch:

As mentioned above… give your mixture enough time for the live active cultures to start breeding and making things thick on their own.
Make sure you keep the mixture in a warm place. 70-77 degrees F is best. If you let it go under 70 F you are making it hard to the good bugs to show you love. Let things warm up a bit. If your oven has a pilot light, you can place it there to warm things up.
Add a little more cultured buttermilk to the mix. Up the measurement to 2 tablespoons per cup. Do a little experimenting. The main reason your sour cream is too thin is it needs more time or more warmth to let the culture do its thing.

How Do You Know If Sour Cream Has Gone Bad?

I was reading someone’s article about this issue and they are giving incorrect advice claiming: “as soon as you see water on top of the sour cream you only have a few days to eat it“. That isn’t true. You need to understand the science behind this.

First, you need to understand what whey is because this is the “water” you are seeing on top of your sour cream. Whey is a protein found in milk. Cows milk is 20% whey protein 80% casein protein. When milk is heated up during the pasteurization process, the whey is “denatured” and the process creates a “hydrophobic interaction”. That essentially means the milk wants to repel water. This is the process that repels the whey and creates the “water” on top of your sour cream. You’ll see this in many dairy products such as yogurt and cottage cheese. It isn’t dangerous at all. Simply mix it back into your sour cream. If you drain this off, your sour cream will get thicker.

The second thing to understand is you are going to be working with live active cultures. That is essentially good bacteria. Bacteria doesn’t like to share it’s space with other bacteria. If the bad bacteria wins, it will make your sour cream or any dairy product smell foul, like rotten milk. It’s a smell many of us are aware of and almost all of us have put our nose to the rim of a gallon of milk to smell it to see if it has gone sour. On the other hand, if your sour cream smells good, it is likely to be safe. There is one exception. If you see mold, toss it out. Don’t try and scoop out the mold and eat the rest. By the time you see the spores, the “haphae” (the spore’s roots) are deep inside the sour cream (or whatever items you see it on). Just getting rid of the visible stuff doesn’t get rid of this root like structure. As a general rule, I like to consume my dairy products in two weeks or less.

Final Thoughts

Making sour cream at home is really easy. It requires very few ingredients and it’s hard to mess things up. Follow the steps above and take your time. Make sure your sour cream is already thickening up before tossing it in the fridge. If it smells bad, don’t eat it. If it doesn’t smell bad, there’s a really good chance you did things right. Milk products have a way of letting you know if they’re bad or not. Because you’re adding live bacteria to the mix, as long as they win the fight, most other bacteria won’t be welcome. Have fun learning to make your own basic pantry items!