With Easter just around the corner, home cooks will fire up barbecues and snap on their ovens to prepare traditional dishes such as roast lamb or glazed ham served with an assortment of side dishes – after the kids have polished off the treats they found during the Easter egg hunt.
As you plan your menu, here’s a suggestion for a simple home-made condiment to garnish a creamy asparagus soup, accompany a side dish such as a potato galette or to be dolloped on a piece of strawberry-rhubarb pie or pineapple upside-down cake: do-it-yourself crème fraîche.
This thick cream is a bit tart and tangy, is satin in texture with full and round mouthfeel and often carries a slight buttery or nutty flavour.
Depending on the quality of the ingredients used to make it and the time allowed for it to set up, the viscosity of crème fraiche can vary from a sour cream consistency to that of something approaching margarine.
Louis Pasteur had a hand in your crème fraîche
As it often does, culinary history intertwines with other, often more serious, events in the world: Napoleon, for example, pretty directly helped spur on developments in canning and preserving food in order to feed his marauding imperialist armies in the early 1800s.
When it comes to crème fraiche, if we could easily get unpasteurized cream (which is not permitted by law) with the necessary helpful bacteria already in it, we could get crème fraîche naturally.
This is where Louis Pasteur, a French microbiologist and chemist born in 1822, comes into play: as his name indicates, Pasteur is responsible for the food-preservation process known as pasteurization (as well as helping prove the germ theory of disease and developing a vaccine for rabies).
Pasteur did research in Dijon, in Burgundy in eastern France – which of course is famous for both its mustard and its wine – before moving to Lille to become the dean of the faculty of sciences.
There, Professor Pasteur was primarily involved with solving the problem of beer and wine spoilage, a major economic concern in France in the mid-1800s.
In the course of his work with dairy, however, Pasteur changed our world – and crème fraiche – forever: as everyone likely knows, our milk and cream has been pasteurized, or heated, and does not have fermenting agents in it.
That’s a good thing, of course: because it has been heated to about 80-degrees C for 30 minutes and then quickly cooled, the milk has been purged of the bacteria that is responsible for typhoid fever, tuberculosis and polio.
Of course, that heating also means it is stripped of some nutritive qualities and the chance to have “natural” crème fraiche.
When you buy commercially-made crème fraiche, it is usually milder and less tangy than sour cream at the same time it has a higher fat content and, depending on the ingredients used to make it, may have fewer additives and stabilizers like carrageenan and locust bean gum (which many liquid dairy products have).
Crème fraiche: the DIY version
So, rather than buy an expensive crème fraiche from a specialty grocer, make a delicious and simple home version yourself – and maintain the safety of pasteurized dairy.
Here’s how to do it.
In a heavy-bottomed saucepan, add two tablespoons of buttermilk (or sour cream) to one cup of 35% heavy cream or whipping cream. Stir and warm the mixture gently.
(It’s an unfortunate logistical characteristic of our dairy packaging, but if you can only buy buttermilk in one-litre cartons, plan to make other dishes with the remainder: perhaps cornbread, buttermilk pancakes or ranch-style salad dressing.)
When slightly warm, transfer the cream-buttermilk mixture into a clean glass bowl, cover with a clean kitchen towel and let stand at room temperature, or warmer, for at least 24 hours and until the concoction gets quite thick. Stir the crème fraîche and refrigerate.
Home-made crème fraîche can’t be frozen very well, but it can be stored, tightly sealed in your refrigerator, for about 10 days.
Crème fraîche is versatile
While I can’t say that crème fraîche will never, ever split, it is in fact a much more stable dairy product and can withstand being incorporated at high temperatures even to the point of boiling: it resists “splitting” or separating which occurs when fats coagulate and separate from their liquid components.
This quality makes crème fraîche quite versatile and suited to both sweet and savoury dishes.
Consider adding a tablespoon or two to soups and sauces. But as well, its smooth and tangy taste is a great garnish to be dolloped onto fresh fruit and desserts such as cobblers, crisps, and clafoutis, the latter the fruit-and-batter dessert of the Limousin region of France.
The process for DIY crème fraiche is also a good activity for teaching kids a bit about science in the kitchen environment.
Food writer Andrew Coppolino lives in Rockland. He is the author of “Farm to Table” and co-author of “Cooking with Shakespeare.” Follow him on Instagram @andrewcoppolino.
