Yasmine Zachmeyer // Little Iowa Farm

If you have a milk cow, you’re most likely trying to find ways to use up excess milk. If you milk twice a day, the average family milk cow will give anywhere from 3-7 gallons A DAY!

I know when we got our cow, I wanted to find ways to lessen our grocery budget and start making our dairy products from scratch. We’ve mastered yogurt and the next on my list was sour cream.

Sour cream is a MUST in our house, we use it in everything. This sour cream recipe isn’t like traditional store-bought sour cream, it’s a bit thinner, but the flavor is out of the world. I’d compare it to a crème fraîche consistency.

When I first started making sour cream, I searched the internet and came across many recipes containing a ‘culture’. I didn’t want to use a culture, I wanted to make it from scratch, just like the old days!

On our road to self-sufficiency, I don’t want to rely on online sources or grocery stores for things like cultures, I want to make it truly from scratch!

Sour cream is literally…soured cream. This grossed me out when I first thought about it, but once I was able to get past that, I was so excited about eliminating one of our favorite dairy products from the grocery list. Plus, this is raw sour cream, so you get all of the great benefits of raw milk!

Ingredients:

• Cream, skimmed from fresh, raw milk. We use cream from milk that’s 2-3 days old, so the cream is nice and thick.

• 1 ½ tsp. of lemon juice

Instructions:

1. Combine ingredients in a pint-sized mason jar

2. Give it a good shake, cover with a cheesecloth, and let culture in a warm place, like a window sill, for 24-36 hours.

3. Taste-test at 24 hours, let it continue to sit if it’s not ‘sour’ enough.

4. Once it’s reached your desired flavor, stir and cover with an air-tight lid, store in the fridge for up to 3 weeks.