Sour Cream Is The Key To A Delectably Tangy Vanilla Ice Cream

Making ice cream at home can quickly become one of your favorite pastimes. For thousands of years, it's been hard to beat the satisfaction of making such a sweet, creamy deliciousness from scratch; with or without an ice cream machine. As with learning how to make other types of food, once you have the basics down it's time to experiment with them. In this vein, try adding sour cream to your next batch of vanilla ice cream.

It might sound wrong at first, but adding sour cream to vanilla ice cream enhances the texture and lends a subtle but scrumptious tang to the overall flavor profile. And since vanilla ice cream is a base for all different kinds of ice cream, this trick can toy with the taste of many different types. Be warned, though: When adding sour cream to vanilla ice cream, there are a couple of things to consider that may not seem obvious.

Think about just how tangy you want your vanilla ice cream. You could theoretically replace all of the cream or milk with sour cream. However, since sour cream is much fattier than milk and has a strong taste, the end result may be overpowering. Try compensating for the extra fat of the sour cream by using it to replace equal amounts of milk and cream.

Some ice creams (for instance French vanilla) involve cooking a custard base. In this case, do not heat the sour cream, or it will give an odd texture to the final product. Make your custard base as instructed, minus whatever cream and milk you are replacing, and whisk the sour cream in when the mixture is cold.

You don't have to limit yourself to just vanilla ice cream, either. The gentle tang afforded by this sour cream swap would also go nicely in a strawberry ice cream, cheesecake ice cream, or maybe even Hidden Valley Ranch ice cream.