[Sca-cooks] Blending sour cream into sauces

[Nicolas Steenhout]

At 10:11 AM 9/25/2001 -0400, you wrote:
>Peters, Rise J. wrote:
>>Last night I made chicken paprikas, which has sour cream added to the gravy
>>as the last step in the cooking process.  Although the results tasted just
>>fine, my sour cream appears to have clotted or coagulated, so that my sauce
>>is a nice pink with white spots.  How does one avoid this?
>
>

Our esteemed Adamantius wrote:
>Sounds like you curdled the sour cream with sudden and excessive heat.
>To avoid this, place your sour cream in a mixing bowl, and add a
>ladelful of the liquid part of your sauce <SNIP>

This technique is nearly infaillible, unless your sauce is too acidic, at
which point the sour cream risks curdling anyway.

Myself, I don't bother with all that adding hot liquid a bit at a time!  I
simply make sure the sauce/stew/liquid is well below boiling point, while
still very hot. I put my sourcream (or regular cream) in a laddle, and dip
the "ass" (that's what we call it in French, you'd say bottom...) of the
laddle in the sauce and warm the sourcream up that way.

Make sure you don't boil up your dish after you've added the sourcream.

>is known in France as thickening or enriching your sauce with a liaison.
>Which, in culinary French, simply means you're thickening it.

Again, correct :-)  Except that we usualy say which kind of liaison, as you
can use roux, corn starch, egg yolks, cream, blood, arrow root, tapioca
(yes, tapioca isn't only used for desserts!), etc...

Just being my semi anal-retentive self :-)

Muiredach mac Loloig
Rokkehealden Shire
aka
Nicolas Steenhout
"You must deal with me as I think of myself" J. Hockenberry