Crème fraîche is hard to find
- Scott Daniels: We Ate Well and Cheaply
- September 30, 2022
- 603
There are two kinds of people I especially enjoy talking with: writers and cooks.
Julia Child once described people who love to eat good food as the best people to be found, and that is undoubtedly so. The earth gives us so many wonders. It seems sinful to turn them away, especially if they come with a rich sauce and a glass of wine.
Find someone who loves to cook — and eat — and they have a quick and ready friend in me. Cooks are great at exchanging information and secrets, and professional cooks give a fun peek into back-of-house shenanigans — not the sort you might expect. The stories I hear from chefs usually revolve around misguided, oddball diners who barge into kitchens to complain, their waitperson trailing behind in protest.
You might think, as a food writer and avid cook, I would snoop into restaurant kitchens all the time, but you would be wrong. Those people are working in unbearable heat, get few breaks, are short tempered, and surrounded by sharp knives and colleagues who duck out for a smoke too often. This is not a place I want to pop into with dumb questions.
Oh, yes, and writers: While you might settle into a fun conversation with a cook about techniques or sourcing ingredients or the origin of favorite dishes or the big Bourdain heartbreak, talking to many writers means hunkering down into an exploration of self doubt, childhood trauma, idolized tortured authors, too much booze and the Oxford comma. Both are my kind of people.
While writers might talk about the novel in their head or the paucity of reliable income, cooks often talk about searches. They’re looking for an expensive piece of equipment on the cheap or an elusive ingredient. There are few things as exciting as finding a source for something hard to get, and that is what happened to me last week.
Crème fraîche is, in our corner of the cornfield, hard to find. It appears in local grocery stores only very rarely, and it is usually priced, like fancy olives, in the “are you out of your mind?” category.
It’s maddening because the ingredients are simple and cheap: cream and buttermilk. It’s easy to make your own at home, and your own version is sure to be better than the stuff in the store.
Except it requires not just cream, but cream that has not been triple pasteurized, which all cream in every store is. Triple pasteurization means everything in the cream that could be of value has been stripped away.
It’s why the version of my aunt’s chocolate chip cream pie never turns out right. Aunt Katherine got her cream from the cow across the barn yard. Store cream should probably be called by some other name. Making crème fraîche with triple-pasteurized cream will yield a jar of watery cream with buttermilk in it. Trust me.
And then, right in my backyard, I found it. Fresh The Market in downtown New Philadelphia has a great supply of locally sourced, farm-to-table ingredients, and on a lark, I popped in to see if any area farm was supplying real cream. It turned out that was exactly the case, and now I have a Mason jar full of creme fraîche and the knowledge I can make more anytime I want for cheap.
Crème fraîche is a close cousin of sour cream yet more pillowy and rich, less tangy. It is perfect with fresh fruit, stirred into creamy soups or on just about anything.
To make it, you need 2 cups of real heavy cream. To this, add 3 tablespoons of cultured buttermilk. Stir it up, cover with cheesecloth and let the mixture stand at room temperature for 24 hours. By then it will have thickened into something approaching cake frosting. Screw on the lid and transfer it to the fridge for a further 24 hours and it’s ready to use.
God help me: I’ve been sneaking it by the spoonful. This, and drinking with writer friends, will likely kill me, but what a way to go.