Impress Your Friends With Our Unusual Homemade Oil and Crème Fraîche

One of the most attractive things a person can do is do something that is usually considered “store bought.” Even though whipped cream is one of the easiest things to make in the kitchen, I still meet people who admire freshly brewed produce. Whipped cream is great, but if you really want to wow someone, do something a little more sophisticated like fresh butter, crème fraîche, or complex butter.

Get (Crème) Fraîche

We’re going to start the super trendy right on the doorstep and talk about making crème fraîche . (Nobody quotes me South Park. If you quote me South Park, I swear to God, I won’t do anything but get a little annoyed.)

If you’ve never tasted crème fraîche, this is a deliciously thickened, slightly sour milk product that can best be described as “better, more oily sour cream.” It is quite expensive and sometimes difficult to find, but it can be made with two very simple ingredients: heavy cream and buttermilk.

This is indeed the case. Simply add two tablespoons of fermented milk to half a liter of heavy cream and leave them covered at room temperature until they are nice and thick (12-24 hours). Once it becomes false and smeared, scoop it up and spread it out for life. The classic accompaniments are pancakes and caviar, but I usually get to a bag of chips and start shoveling them. Aside from the dipping, crème fraîche is a delicious ingredient in all recipes, from sweet to savory.

Some ideas:

• Make a rich and delicious chocolate chip cookie
• Mash into potatoes
• Whisk it into cauliflower
• Fold it up in ryllet
• Use it, but you would use sour cream for sauces or as a condiment.
• Add to cold salads for added butteriness.

If you’re wondering which cream to use, just make sure it’s thick. I read that one should avoid ultra-pasteurization (in theory the bacteria can convert less lactose), but, when in the last year wrote an article about the science of cream for of Serious Eats , I conducted a little experiment, I tried to prepare the crème fraîche with both pasteurized and UHT cream, and found that UP cream not only worked great, but was better than “regularly” pasteurized batches.

Cover with oil

Making butter is as easy as whipping cream. Seriously, all you have to do to make butter is whip the cream badly, go through the fluffy cloud stage, go through the grainy mess stage to where the fat globules begin to lose their texture as they clump together. form butter.

In fact, I would say that butter is easier to make than whipped cream because it doesn’t require the same constant vigilance. You can prepare butter in two ways: cultured or uncultivated. This does not mean that one prefers to watch documentaries about typefaces while the other is eating KUWTK , but rather that one is made from cream that has been acidified (cultivated). If sour milk cream sounds vaguely familiar to you, it’s because we just spent a couple hundred words on it talking about crème fraîche.

Both fermented and sweet butter are made the same way (whipping up dairy as hell), the only difference is your starting material. For regular butter, start with heavy cream; for cultivation, start with the crème fraîche you just prepared. Toss one into a mixer, food processor, bowl, or jar and stir. Whipping with your hands and shaking in a jar will get you there, but it will take longer and will really work your upper body. (Or maybe it’s just me and my pale frail physique as a writer.)

After a lot of shaking / whipping / whipping, you’ll have a whipped cream that you might want to eat, but go ahead son and make it grainy. Things will get hard, yellow and lumpy, and then – like magic – everything will stick together, the water will fall, and you will have the oil that you made yourself. Dig it up, drain off excess water, and place in a bowl of ice water. Wash it off by pressing and folding in an ice bath, replacing the water as needed until it turns clear while handling the oil. Pour the water out of the tub and squeeze out the oil, removing as much water as possible. (Water supports microbial growth, and you don’t need that noise.) Wrap it in plastic wrap and refrigerate or freeze.

I really don’t feel like you need more direction here. I’m pretty sure you know what to do with the oil.

Complicate your no-problem

Now that you have butter and crème fraîche, you can mix them together to create a complex crème fraîche butter that is arguably the most magical ingredient to ever grace baked potatoes. (Also known in the UK as “jacket potatoes,” I prefer that name.)

To make this delicious formula, I roughly follow the instructions for Heston Blumenthal’s sour butter and mix equal parts crème fraîche and sweet butter. (Alternatively, you can make 50% butter, 25% crème fraîche, and 25% cream cheese.)

Crème Fraîche butter

Ingredients:

• ½ cup crème fraîche, preferably allowed to thicken for a full 24 hours
• ½ cup sweet butter

Instructions:

1. Melt half the butter in a bowl over boiling water. Remove and whisk the crème fraîche.
2. Place the bowl back in boiling water, add the remaining butter and stir until completely melted and blended.
3. Transfer to a small container with a lid and refrigerate until firm. Use within three days.

This is my favorite combo dairy product, but the fun doesn’t end there. When it comes to making complex oils, there are literally endless options. They are very easy to make; it’s just a matter of mixing, rolled tightly into parchment paper (a dough scraper can help with this) and cooling.

If you’re looking for a simple herbal oil for steaks or seafood, I recommend starting with Alton Brown’s recipe , which combines garlic with garlic, thyme, sage, and rosemary for a super fresh explosion of flavor.

Other flavor combinations you might want to try (all sizes are meant to be mixed with ½ cup butter):

• 1 inch grated ginger + zest of one lemon
• 1 vanilla pod + ¼ cup brown sugar + zest of one orange
• ¼ cups basil leaves + 5-6 sun-dried tomatoes + a few drops of balsamic vinegar
• 3 tbsp. blue cheese + 2 tbsp. bacon fat + 1/2 sautéed shallots
• 2 cloves of garlic + ½ cup chopped flat-leaf parsley + 2 tbsp. lemon juice

Make sure you use them for a few days and keep them refrigerated, but I doubt you will have any nutritional issues as they ask to be thrown at just about anything.

More…