Give Your Homemade Ice Cream A Tangy Upgrade With This Heavy Cream Swap

Whipping up a batch of homemade ice cream isn't as tricky as it used to be with modern contraptions like the Ninja Creami making light work of this once laborious process. However, once you've had your fun of experimenting with traditional ice cream recipes, you might feel like stirring things up with new flavors and ideas. We spoke to expert Tyler Malek, Salt & Straw co-founder and head ice cream maker, who gave us an incredible but simple tip to upgrade homemade ice cream and lend it a tangier, complex personality — swapping the heavy cream for sour cream.

"Sour cream can add an incredible flavor and tang to your ice cream," Malek explains. "The trick with using sour cream in ice cream base recipes is that it's not a 1:1 replacement for heavy cream because it only has about half of the total fat as heavy cream. I love using sour cream in lower fat recipes like gelato (which typically only has about half that fat of artisan ice cream) or augmenting the fat with extra heavy cream."

Sour cream has a fat content of 18% (versus the heftier 48% in heavy cream), which produces an ice cream or Italian-style gelato that's lighter on the palate. While gelato isn't as creamy as classic ice cream, it does have a silky-smooth consistency and is equally as flavorful. Its dense texture is a result of a slower churning process, which reduces the amount of air incorporated into its body.

Malek reckons that the natural flavor of sour cream can affect the flavor of the other ice cream ingredients in a positive way. "One of my favorite recipes is a combination of sour cream gelato with fresh strawberries because the brightness of the sour cream completely changes the way you taste the strawberries," he says. If you want to give this a try, consider subbing some of the heavy cream in this roasted strawberry and black pepper gelato recipe with sour cream. Feel free to play around with the ratios, adding more heavy cream if you're after a richer consistency with a mellower hint of acidity. 

Don't have an ice cream maker? Consider making no-churn ice cream by combining whipped cream, condensed milk, salt, and vanilla together before freezing. Simply substitute some of the whipping cream for sour cream to lend your scoop of gelato a tangier attitude.

The tangy flavor of sour cream comes from a lactic acid bacteria. A natural byproduct created during the fermentation of many other probiotic foods, like yogurt and sauerkraut, it imparts a sour taste to the light cream and thickens it slightly by coagulating its inherent proteins. This sour note provides a welcome contrast against super-sweet additions, such as chunks of chocolate, caramel, or cookie dough.