[Sca-cooks] Creme Fraiche

[Donna Green]

Ana, creme fraiche is excessively easy to make. Take one pint or so of good heavy cream and add 1 to 3 tablespoons of butter milk. Leave it in a bowl, covered in plastic wrap, overnight on the counter. There you have it ... creme fraiche. You can leave it a bit longer if you want more thickness and/or more tang, but I wouldn't leave it out more than 30 hours. You'd want to use it or refridgerate it then. You do not want to use ultra pasteurized cream ... I don't know if you have that in Uruguay, but you don't want a cream that has been treated with high heat or had anything added to it.

Lately I've been making creme fraiche and then turning it into butter. Marvelous stuff. Just put the creme fraiche in the food processor and switch it on. When the sound changes (the cream gets lumpy and becomes butter) wring it out and there's your butter. Salt or not as you choose. Save the butter milk ... liquid released when you wring out the butter ... to use for the next batch. The butter milk freezes just fine. The butter milk is also useful as a starter culture in cheese making.

Now, the question is ... are there any period references to creme fraiche or something that could possibly be creme fraiche like?

Juana Isabella


Date: Tue, 25 Feb 2014 00:35:03 -0200
 From: Ana Vald?s <agora158 at gmail.com>
 To: Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>
 Cc: SCA-Cooks maillist SCA-Cooks <SCA-Cooks at ansteorra.org>
 Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] souring agents
 
 By the way, speaking about souring agents, in Uruguay we
 lack creme fraiche, same sour cream was made before, it was called
 russian cream and  it was very similar smetana, the creme the Russian use to
 make bortsch. I  read in some place you can achieve same consistence and
 flavour if you add  some spoon of vinegar to cream. Does anybody know if it's
 true? If it's  not, does anybody have any advice to get creme fraiche?
 Thanks in advance
 Ana