One pint o'homemade sour cream. Would you like fries with that?

I promised you Homemade Week last week, and I made good on that promise by staying home on Friday. So no post. Actually I wasn’t home much that day, having accepted an invitation to spend my day off first at the local high school career day, talking up my career (such as it is), and later at the elementary school, losing a battle with the 4th grade class as to how to draw their self portraits. I had lost my voice. It is useless to go to war with 4th graders when one has laryngitis.

So it’s a new week, and I have to tell you about homemade sour cream. Jess made some last week and put it on potatoes she made, and wow! I was impressed. It was not as thick as the store-bought stuff, but I figure just about everything we make, grow, or raise at home will be different somehow from the store-bought variety.

Here’s the ree-sype. Or, I should say, the dee-rexions.

Get one pint of the thickest possible cream off your gallon of raw milk. Better yet, get one pint of cream off of two gallons of milk, to ensure that you don’t have any wimpy cream (or, horrors, actual milk) in your future sour cream.

Place the pint jar o’cream in a bowl of hot water to warm it up. When the jar is warm to the touch, add 3-4 tablespoons of buttermilk (“the fresher the better,” we’re told), depending on the desired consistency. Mix buttermilk with cream, cover, and let it sit out on the kitchen counter overnight. In the morning, you’ll have sour cream.

Once it’s sour cream’s sour, you’ll have to put it in the fridge. Otherwise you’ll have a Bad Thing.

The first time we did this, we had sour cream. And behold, it was yummy. The second, third, or tenth time, we do it, you never know. I’ve learned to make better bread by defying my own recipe, and Jessica produced yogurt the other day that had the consistency of actual yogurt (instead of yogurt-flavored liquid), simply by breaking the rules that came with the yogurt-maker. That’s how these things go. Practice makes perfect. If our recipes ever kill me, I’ll let you know.