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Sour cream: benefits and recipe. Video
Since ancient times, sour cream has been a traditional Slavic product and the most delicious part of sour milk that forms in its upper layer. It is difficult to imagine life without fresh sour cream, which improves the taste of many dishes and brings invaluable benefits to the human body.
A delicate homogeneous mass, called “Russian cream” by Europeans, is ideal for creating various culinary masterpieces. Sour cream is added to cold and hot first courses in order to reveal their taste to the maximum and emphasize the shades of the products used.
Sour cream is used for roasting carp, perch, pike, carp and other river fish, as it dissolves small bones and makes fish dishes much tastier
Sour cream dressings add spice and light sourness to various salads. Dumplings and pancakes, cheese cakes and casseroles are always served with sour cream, and creams based on it have long been recognized as one of the best for creating delicate pastries and airy cakes.
The benefits of sour cream
This natural and nutritious product is able to provide the human body with adequate nutrition for the whole day. Its rich composition contains: – vitamins A, B, C, D, PP; – calcium, phosphorus, magnesium, potassium, biotin and sodium; – as well as many other macro- and microelements.
In addition, sour cream enriches the body with high-grade animal protein, acids, sugar and carbohydrates. Thanks to these properties, sour cream is considered the first folk remedy for problems with male potency.
In the presence of diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, obesity and atherosclerosis, you should always check the fat content of the product: with these diagnoses, fatty sour cream is contraindicated
In folk medicine, sour cream is used to treat rheumatism, radiculitis, diseases of internal organs and skin diseases. Nutritionists recommend choosing good sour cream and taking it during the rehabilitation period after fractures, as well as for intestinal colitis and stomach ulcers.
The miracle properties of sour cream are also popular in home cosmetology. Sour cream masks give the face skin freshness, whiten it, smooth wrinkles and narrow enlarged pores. Sour cream with fruit and other skin-friendly ingredients makes excellent creams that need to be refrigerated. It can also be used to prepare body lotion, which after its application will become soft and velvety.
Making sour cream at home
If you don’t want to buy sour cream, you can make it yourself. The easiest way to make homemade sour cream is to naturally sour natural cream. Spoon off the cream that has formed on the sour milk, and remove it to ripen in the cold.
To make thick sour cream, you need a high-fat cream. A 20% product is best suited for this purpose.
To speed up the process, put a crust of black bread or one tablespoon of sour cream in the cream. Remember that if the cream is too long, the sour cream will turn out sour.
No less popular is the recipe for “grandmother’s” sour cream. Put a colander on the pan, cover its bottom with two layers of cheesecloth and pour kefir into the pan. Place the container with the colander in the refrigerator overnight. In the morning, take out the pan and scoop up the sour cream from the top layer of the gauze.
The modern version of making homemade sour cream is as follows: heat store milk and pour it into a container. Cover the dishes with thick gauze, tie it with string and leave to sour for a few days. After the whey begins to come up and reaches ¼ of the total volume of the container, pour the sour milk into a colander covered with gauze. When the whey is drained, a jelly-like mass remains – beat it with a blender until the consistency you need for several minutes. Put the whipped sour cream in the refrigerator for half an hour, after which it is ready for use.
Homemade sour cream from sourdough
Excellent homemade sour cream is made from sourdough. To prepare it, take sour cream and a glass of cream, which have been heated to forty degrees Celsius and poured into a glass jar scalded with boiling water. Then add two tablespoons of fresh sour cream to a bowl of warmed cream and mix the ingredients well.
To make the sour cream thicker, add a little citric acid and dissolved gelatin to the cream – the product will acquire a slightly sour taste and thicken
Use skim milk instead of cream to make low-fat sour cream.
Wrap the jar in a warm blanket and leave it there for seven to nine hours, during which the jar should not be shaken or repositioned. After the expiration date, remove the container from the blanket and put it in the refrigerator, where the sour cream thickens.
If you want to prepare a product that contains “live” lactobacilli, you can buy a ready-made starter culture that does not contain preservatives, stabilizers or vegetable fats. Sour cream from such a leaven retains all its beneficial properties, vitamins, trace elements and organic acids.