Thursday, August 28, 2014

My Fake Sour Cream Mission

My current food mission is to create a tasty, easy, viable fake sour cream.
I believe I am on to something.
In the past I've used tofu to which I've added vinegar and lemon and canola oil. It worked well. I was very happy with it and even happier when I decided to add a wee bit of salt and sugar to moderate the flavour and happier yet when I discovered a bit of tahini gave it great body.

I've cycled away from tofu. I've nothing against it; I've simply moved on.
What I moved to was coconut milk. It makes a great substitute for milk and cream depending on the thickness of the product.  Though available already made up in a carton in the milk section of stores I prefer to buy canned and make it the way I like without sugar or stabilizers or what-have-you.
My favourite brand has added guar gum. This is not a crime.
I whir it together with about one-third of a can of water and get about three cups of coconut milk. It's great on fruit, baked goods, and my morning oatmeal.

I checked out a few recipes for making it into sour cream. Most say to drain off the water and then mix in vinegar and/or lemon and/or salt and let it sit.
This makes a reasonable facsimile of sour cream. Because I'd already added water to mine it was runnier that I'd like, but it still did the job.
Yesterday I played around a bit with the recipe. I mixed up some tahini for body for it and then added it to about a half a cup of coconut milk.
It was still fairly runny so I mixed it psyllium fibre. All together it may have been half a teaspoon of it.
It helped a bit, but I think I should have added it in with the tahini. I'll try that next time.
Guar gum may be a better addition, but for now I am going to play with the psyllium fibre. I am convinced it will work.
As to the taste, it is pretty good. I have to play around more to get the souring correct for my tastes, but a) experimenting is fun and b) you get to hide the failures by eating them.

The batch I made yesterday was for a Scandinavian style cucumber salad:

It's tasty and it worked.

3 comments:

Red said...

I've gone to drinking almond milk because of allergies. I like it but I never use it for any cooking.

messymimi said...

Oh, yum! It looks so good. That's the kind of stuff i wish my whole family would eat. If they would try it, i'm sure they would love it.

Leah J. Utas said...

Almond milk is really good in baking, Red. Not sure how it would work as fake sour cream. I may have to try it.

Messymimi, it was really good. The cuke was very large pickling cuke my FIL grew. The fake sour cream worked out well on it.