Sour Cream

I made my first goat milk sour cream the other night. I am in love with the flavor and the process couldn't be easier! With Esther, Nan and Gretta all in milk we are getting 3/4 of a gallon in the morning milking. The kids get the evening milking in their bottle, so when they are weaned we'll have 1 1/2 to 2 gallons per day. Zach and I have been trying to get into a schedule to process the milk into our different dairy needs. We've taken a break from complicated-long process hard cheeses for a while and instead are concentrating on simple farm cheeses, mozzarella, soft cheeses or separating the cream for ice cream, sour cream and butter. Next on my list is cream cheese and yogurt. I tired yogurt about a year ago and it was a major fail! So I'd like to re-visit that.

But sour cream couldn't be easier. First we separated the whole milk into cream and skimmed milk. (Side note) I know some of you have inquired as to the manufacturer of our cream separator. I still haven't been able to find our exact model on line as we did before. But I just did a search on E-bay for "hand crank cream separator" and found several models comparable to ours between $75 to $100. I'll write a future post on how to operate and assemble the machine as the instructions for ours were in Ukrainian.  

Onward and out... Here is the complicated recipe. (not really)

1/4 cup store bought sour cream (I used the all natural brand from Kroger. The ingredient list was cultured sour cream, skim milk, enzymes. I didn't see an organic brand offered, or I would have used that.)
1 cup raw cream (You have to use raw with this recipe otherwise the cream will spoil before it sours)

I mixed the sour cream into the warm cream in a mason jar. I covered with a coffee filter and rubber band and let it set out overnight.That's it!

In the morning, it had formed a thick layer of sour cream and the cream had thickened significantly. I stirred it all together and set it in the fridge. When it was cold I tasted it and it is AMAZING! It's really tangy but slightly SWEET! Much more than the store bought. It's just really creamy and wonderful. I feel like it could have been a bit thicker, but I blame that on our house being cold all the time.

All. The. Time.

I'm wondering if the sour cream will get thicker as the warmer summer months come.

So to make my next batch, I will keep a 1/4 cup from this batch and add it to the cream from our next milking. It's like Friendship Dairy...

Another side note: I love these half gallon mason jars! But they're hard to find. Mason makes a full gallon too but the lid is more for decorative storage not actual canning. Anyhoo, they work great for storing milk! We got close to a half gallon of cream from almost 3 gallons of milk. The Nubians have a lot of fat in their milk, I would say twice the amount. But Esther (our Alpine) produces twice the milk, so it's a good combination.

Additional sources: Gnowfglins