Why does cream thicken when whipped

No matter how perfectly your whipped cream is made, if it is hot and humid out, it will wilt and melt. Adding a stabilizer to your whipped cream can help it maintain structure in the heat and humidity.

You over whip. You try to make it in a rush. Whipped cream is a quick dish to make, but be sure to set aside the time so that you can give it the proper attention. First things first: chill your cream.

Be sure that you have time to pay attention to your whipped cream. But if you put it on top of a brownie that is still warm, your whipped cream will melt. It will keep just fine for several hours. Do you like whipped cream on top of desserts? Guest column: How Nude Dude Food is paying it forward. Classic v. Contemporary Fashion in the Kitchen. Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published.

Popular Recommended. June Apron Ace: Lionel Lowery. Chef coats or aprons? Tips on choosing the right short-sleeved chef coat. Once the cream forms soft peaks, pour in the powdered sugar and the gelatin. Turn the mixer to low speed and keep beating until the gelatin and sugar are fully incorporated and the cream forms stiff peaks.

Refrigerate your stabilized whipped cream for up to 24 hours. Unlike regular whipped cream, which deflates after about 3 hours, stabilized whipped cream will hold its shape for a whole day. The gelatin will not affect the flavor or texture, but will make the peaks stay firmer for longer.

Did you make this recipe? Leave a review. Method 2. Refrigerate a carton of heavy whipping cream. Keeping the whipping cream cold will make it hold its shape longer when you whip it. Heavy whipping cream or heavy cream both work great. They only need to be in there for about 5 minutes to get chilled.

Pour the cold whipping cream. The cream will at least double in volume when you whip it up, so make sure to use a large bowl. If you want to make 2 cups mL of whipped cream, start with 2 cups mL of heavy cream. If you want to make plain whipped cream without any sugar or vanilla, then leave them out. The cream will still whip up to a lovely texture, it will just taste less sweet. Whip the cream with a hand mixer until soft peaks form.

Pour in the sugar and cream of tartar as you keep whipping. Gently pour in the sugar and cream of tartar with one hand, and with the other, keep whipping the cream. Lots of recipes use it to stabilize or increase volume. You can buy it in the baking aisle of the supermarket.

Continue whipping until the cream reaches the desired consistency. You can decide how soft you want your whipped cream to be. Soft peaks are good for eating with berries, and stiffer peaks are great for piping on cakes. Just eat it as tasty homemade butter and start over for your whipped cream.

Eat your whipped cream right away or put it in the refrigerator. Next, you'll start to see some soft peaks that sit on top of the cream's surface, but no real change in volume. Pay close attention, because once you notice an increase in volume, accompanied by firmer peaks that hold their shape, you've made it.

Shut it down and get that stuff on some strawberries. If you decide to whisk boldly on, you'll continue to wreck the phospholipid membrane, exposing even larger portions of fat. These newly exposed regions are now free to clump with their fatty friends. The air—no longer surrounded and stabilized by the network of globules—escapes and your foam deflates, leaving you with a greasy and granular product.

Your whipped cream will appear stiff and slightly yellow, and you may even be able to see little clumps. If this happens, don't freak out. Your whipped cream may be ruined, but you're well on your way to something equally delicious Once you've gone past that pillowy, firm-but-not-stiff whipped cream stage, and you begin to see evidence of dense globule gatherings, you're making butter.

Butter can be made in a food processor, stand mixer, or even a jar. The key is agitation. Shaking cream in a jar until it turns into butter can be exhausting it's kind of like a culinary Shake Weight but whether you are whipping, shaking, or thrashing the cream around in the food processor, what you're ultimately doing is smashing those little globules of fat into each other, damaging their walls and causing the hydrophobic water-fearing regions to clump together.

The cream will become thicker and thicker as more and more fatty triglycerides gather into one mass. Eventually, enough fat is exposed and there's room for everyone to get together, eliminating the need for triglycerides to partner up with air. In other words, fat was just stringing air along until other fat became available.

Once air leaves feeling humiliated and used the network collapses, and the water that was being held in suddenly and dramatically separates from the solid mass of butterfat. The solid portion is butter, now ready to be drained and washed. Scoop it out, letting the watery milk drain off, and place your solid butter in a bowl of clean ice water. Fold it and press it around the bowl a few times, dumping and replacing the water until it rinses clear. Dispose of the last bit of rinse water and continue to knead the butter a little while longer, expelling excess liquid.

Water promotes microbial growth, and failure to remove the watery skim milk can result in it souring, which would spoil all of your beautiful butter. Once you've squeezed out as much liquid as humanly possible, pack it tightly together, wrap it up with plastic wrap, and refrigerate or freeze.

Or maybe spread directly onto some good bread and get it into your mouth pronto. Remember way back when, before Gustaf de Laval busted out his centrifuge? Remember those dark times?

Back then, the only way to separate delicious, fatty cream from milk was to let gravity do the work. Raw milk would just sit there, and someone would have to skim the cream off of the top.

Well it wasn't actually that bad. All that sitting around meant that bacteria had time to grow, something that sounds gross but is actually awesome. Bacteria is what gives cultured cream, butter, and buttermilk their delightfully acidic tang. These "cream cultures" are a group of various bacteria that allow us to create wonders such as cheese and sour cream.

One of these guys is Lactococcus lactis "lacto" meaning "milk" and "coccus" meaning "sphere" , a microbe that is informally classified as the lactic acid bacterium, due to its ability to transform lactose into lactic acid through fermentation. When bacteria are introduced to dairy, it makes a meal of lactose, converting it into energy and producing lactic acid as a happy byproduct.

The increase in acid decreases the pH of the cream, changing the flavor and making the environment inhospitable to other, less friendly microbes. This nutty, buttery, soured cream has many savory and sweet applications. Use it as a dip for chips, on blinis with caviar, or as a tangy foil for sweet, ripe berries. The stuff can be frustratingly hard to find in prepared form and—if you do happen to find it—can cost you as much as a dollar an ounce.

Making it at home is much more cost effective, and only requires heavy cream, buttermilk, and patience. Simply add two tablespoons of buttermilk to a pint of cream, leave it at room temperature, and let the bacteria take it from there. The cultures will get to work, chowing down on that delicious lactose, producing not only acid, but other flavor compounds, such as the buttery diacetyl the same molecule added to "buttered" popcorn.

Depending on the cream, and the temperature of your home, this process can take anywhere from 8 hours to days. Lactococcus lactis is happiest at around 70 degrees, but as long as your house isn't a freezing tundra or tropical rainforest, you should be okay.

Eventually, the cream will thicken and the pH will reach around 4. Stir and refrigerate, and then put it on everything. Check out the full recipe here.

A word on the cream: I had always heard that ultra-pasteurized cream should be avoided at all costs when attempting to make any type fermented dairy. In On Food and Cooking , Harold McGee states that ultra-pasteurization decreases the lactose content, effectively putting the bacteria on a diet and robbing them of their favorite meal. Being the experimental chemist that I am, I decided to do a side-by-side comparison, and was surprised to find that the ultra-pasteurized batch actually came out perfectly.

Here is how they looked after twenty four hours of thickening:. Besides reminding me of my undergrad research—where every day was opposite day and the chemicals never did what they were supposed to—this flew in the face of everything I thought I knew about soured dairy.

Once I collected the shattered pieces of my brain off the floor, I consulted with some of the Serious Eats editors and we came up with a few as-yet untested and unproven theories:. Carrageenan may be thickening the ultra-pasteurized cream.