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.

Toothsome Tuesday

I’ve been experimenting with dairy substitutes. I discovered in the early 1990s that I was cow’s milk intolerant. Sheep and goat cheese are fine for me, and I use goat milk in my morning coffee. My husband can’t handle dairy very well either so when I need milk or cream or butter I use a substitute.

Some, like almond milk, are really good.
Others, like rice milk, are pretty good.
Cashew cream is wonderful. It’s thick and rich and creamy and is absolutely amazing on pumpkin pie. I’d live on it except for a really swell allergic reaction to cashews. I can live with it, though, and corn and pineapple do the same thing to me.

Tofu makes a good cream, especially if it’s in with a bit of tahini (sesame paste). Tahini is good on it’s own as a cream or thinned as a milk, and if mixed with a bit of coconut lard it makes a lovely butter substitute in baking.

Yesterday I made oat milk. The recipe called for simmering oats for an hour then draining off the water. Said water formed the milk. It’s quite slimy and smells like pasta water. The taste is okay.
I mashed some in potatoes. The taste was okay, but the consistency was gluey. I mixed a bit of sugar and vanilla in and used it on cobbler-crisp-bread pudding thing I’d thrown together a few days earlier. This was very tasty, but again, the consistency is very off-putting.

The leftover oats gave me an idea so I made up some fake cream cheese with tofu and, once everything had been around long enough to develop flavor, I made fake cheesecake. The cooked rolled oats became the cottage cheese called for in the recipe I was abusing, and I threw in some of the oat milk for liquid.
I insulted a second recipe so this is both a hybrid and an invention. Those are the best.
Said cheeseless cake is resting comfortably in the fridge now. I want to make sure it gets plenty of time for the flavors to gather.

Meanwhile, I found the formula for making potato milk. It will be today’s experiment. It sounds like I need to boil a potato and then blend it in its boiling water. It certainly sounds easy. But how will it taste? And is it something I’d want to dunk a cookie in?
Stay tuned.