Homemade Sour Cream

I never liked sour cream.... until I made some myself.  It's delicious.  We use it in recipes like you would use any store-bought sour cream.  we also use it in our Fruit and Cream Popsicles.  Recipe for those here:  Fruit-and-Cream-Popsicles

Basic instructions:

Choosing a Cream

Different creams will produce sour cream with different thicknesses. Choose the one that works best for you.

• Pasteurized heavy cream or whipping cream will yield the thickest sour cream.
• Half-and-half can be used, but the sour cream will have a thinner consistency. Dry milk powder can be added to improve the consistency, if desired.
• Raw cream can be used but will yield a thinner consistency than if pasteurized whipping cream is used. Learn more about using raw cream to make sour cream here!
• Avoid ultra-pasteurized (UP) or ultra-high temperature (UHT) cream, as it yields inconsistent results when used for culturing sour cream.

We use either raw cream which we skim from the top of our raw milk.  If we don't have enough raw milk/cream on hand - we love to use the batch-pasteurized Kalona Cream brand.  It.is.delicious!

As our "starter" ingredient we use Kalona brand yogurt.  You can use any yogurt that has NO sweetners or additives in it.  Organic is important as well.

Sour Cream Ingredients

• 1/4 cup yogurt of choice
• 1 quart size jar of cream

Instructions for Making Sour Cream

1. If the cream is store-bought and pasturized, you must first heat it before making your cream.  With raw cream, heating is not necessary but warming it up can help get the process going.
3. Heat cream to 185°F and then quickly cool it.
4. Cool cream to 85F.  I use a bowl with water and ice and I put the cooking pan right into it to get the cream to cool to at least 85F.
5. Add starter culture (yogurt) and stir gently.
6. Transfer to a glass jar; I use a quart size mason jar.  Cover with a coffee filter or tight-weave cloth or loosely secured lid.
7. Place the jar in a deydrator at 95 degree F for 20-24 hours.  You can also use your oven for this purpose if the oven light will heat the oven to 90 degrees or so.
8. Once the sour cream has set, place a tight lid on the jar and store in the refrigerator.
9. Sour cream will keep in the refrigerator for 2-3 weeks.