Sour Cream Is Such a Magical Ingredient in Baked Goods—Here's Why (2024)

FAQs

Sour Cream Is Such a Magical Ingredient in Baked Goods—Here's Why? ›

Moisture That Matters

Baking with Sour Cream: The creamy texture of sour cream makes baked goods more moist than if you used milk. This makes sour cream an excellent choice for recipes that are known to have drier results, like sponge cakes.

The lactic acid bacteria increases the thickness of the cream and adds its characteristic tangy flavor. You can use sour cream as an ingredient to add an acidic flavor to sweet and savory meals.

Cultured sour cream is made by adding a culture of Streptococcus lactis to pasteurized light cream and incubating at 72˚F until the desired flavor and thickness is reached. The lactic acid produced by the culture coagulates the protein, thickening the cream and adding the characteristically sour flavor.

Mayo is a great sour cream substitute. It can be used as a 1:1 replacement in both baking and dips. You'll lose some of that tang that sour cream offers, but it still does a great job at adding moisture to baked goods. Plus, it's relatively the same texture as sour cream, which makes it a great sub in dips and sauce.

Cream Cheese, Mascarpone, and Cottage Cheese

Fresh, spreadable cheeses like cream cheese and mascarpone generally work well as 1:1 substitutes for sour cream in baking. Be sure to let them warm up to room temperature before using, and thin them out slightly by stirring in milk or lemon juice to get a similar texture.

Sour cream (sometimes known as soured cream in British English) is a dairy product obtained by fermenting regular cream with certain kinds of lactic acid bacteria.

The United States in this region is the largest consumer of Sour Cream products.

Signs of Spoilage

If it smells moldy, rancid, or stinky in any way beyond the usual sour smell, it probably has extra growth in it that will affect the flavor and safety. Mold: If you see mold growing on the surface, the whole container needs to go. Don't be tempted just to scoop the mold off the top and eat the rest.

Saturated fat is the predominant fat in sour cream. In fact, about half of the calories in regular sour cream come from saturated fat. Excess intake of saturated fat may cause some people to produce more LDL (bad) cholesterol. If these levels become too high, your risk of heart disease may increase over time ( 7 ).

Is sour cream good for your gut? ›

Usually, regular sour cream won't help your gut the same way yogurt can. But some brands add bacteria cultures back in after the last round of pasteurization. If you can find these products, they might help promote a healthy balance of bacteria in your gut.

In one recent meta-analysis, researchers actually found that dairy had a modest anti-inflammatory effect in individuals with metabolic disorders. Much of these effects can be attributed to the fermented dairy products such as kefir, yogurt, or sour cream that can easily be incorporated into a healthy diet.

A common source of sour cravings is a lack of stomach acid in the body. If we do not eat a sufficient amount of acidic foods, our stomach acid levels drop, making it difficult for the stomach to sterilize and break down the foods we eat.

Sour cream is also rich in monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats, which are considered to be the healthiest types of fats as they help reduce unhealthy cholesterol levels, lower the risk of heart disease, and promote healthy blood sugar levels.

Sour cream has a high fat content and is a good source of calories. It is thought that sour cream originated from koumiss (also spelled kumiss), a slightly alcoholic drink made from mare's milk and first fermented by the Botai people of what is now Kazakhstan—who may have been among the first humans to tame horses.

More Moist and Flavorful Batters and Doughs

Of course, sour cream can be used to enhance more than texture. It adds body and fermented flavor to these extra-flaky buttermilk biscuits and all five of our cornbread variations. We even throw it into sweet potato pancakes to offset the sweetness with some sour tang.

Both the yogurt and the sour cream mixtures quickly curdled, while the crème fraîche mixture remained perfectly creamy. Curdling occurs when excessive heat causes the whey proteins in dairy to denature (unfold) and bind with casein proteins, forming clumps of larger proteins.

When you add sour cream, you add moisture that is surrounded by fat. Both the fat in the butter and the fat in the sour cream help keep water molecules away from protein molecules, resulting in a more tender pie crust.

Excess quantity of buttermilk or sour cream may make the texture of your cake so soft that it may collapse easily and may not hold on its own.