12 Things You Might Not Know About Sour Cream

Sour cream: the last topping to go on nachos, the first thing a nutritionist will tell you to trade for Greek yogurt. OK, maybe it's got a high fat content, but this wonderful ingredient does have healthy properties of its own. This condiment can sometimes be overlooked, but there are many uses for sour cream that every home cook should know. It is an incredibly versatile foodstuff and has an interesting history to boot.

For instance, you might know that the condiment is crucial to Eastern European cooking, but did you know that sour cream is also a product of fermentation? That's right: The next time you order loaded potato skins at the casual chain restaurant of your choice, you can happily inform the rest of your table that you're doing something to help your gut biome. You can say the same thing at Thanksgiving if you add sour cream to gravy. Let us not get ahead of ourselves, though. Here are 12 fascinating facts for all you sour cream disciples out there.

This one is a necessary public service announcement for anyone who's keeping sour cream in their home kitchen for the first time. When you open a tub of sour cream, there is often a watery liquid at the top. This is perfectly normal — that's whey, and it contains proteins and nutrients you might want to stir back into the cream you're about to scoop. The separation is completely natural and doesn't signal anything off with your cream. While you certainly have the option of discarding that liquid if it's unnerving, you really don't want to.

You'll want to stir the whey back in because whey is incredibly nutritious. There's a reason protein powder labels advertise their whey content. This protein is a great source of protein that makes your sour cream more satiating and better at promoting muscle growth. There is also evidence that whey can help lower blood pressure, fight inflammation, and strengthen antioxidants. Getting rid of that separated whey might not affect the taste of your sour cream, but not having it will diminish your cream.

Sour cream pound cake. Sour cream coffee cake. Anthill cake. Sour cream as the basis for cake icing. It might seem counterintuitive at first, but the cultured cream has a litany of uses in sweet treats.

Bakers love sour cream because its fat content lends plenty of richness but also because its natural tang prevents a sugary dessert from getting cloyingly sweet. Balancing flavors is crucial for any dish, particularly super sweet desserts. Consider how a few shakes of flaky salt can elevate caramel — that's what sour cream does to cake. The condiment is also a great way to introduce moisture to a batter without sacrificing thickness. No one wants their cake to turn into a mouthful of dried crumbs, nor do you want a batter so watery it can't hold together. Enter sour cream, the perfect middle ground.

One important note: there is a rule for swapping sour cream for Greek yogurt in desserts. It's true, Greek yogurt can be a lower-fat substitute that still has some tang. Sometimes, though, Greek yogurt gets artificially thickened with gums and starches. That's the stuff you want to avoid. Also be aware that while a 1:1 ratio of sour cream to Greek yogurt is usually best, the latter can make your dessert denser.

Because sour cream is a dairy product, you might imagine it's always gluten-free. Not so fast, though — some companies add thickeners, stabilizers, and preservatives that might contain gluten. These types of gums and fillers are standard practice in our modernized food systems — one of the trade-offs we make to have just about any food item we could dream of constantly available on grocery store shelves. Unless you want to get into fermenting your own sour cream, you've got to be vigilant about every ingredient in the product you're consuming.

Make sure to read the label before buying sour cream if you're worried about gluten. Even cross-contamination can be a concern if the sour cream is produced in a facility that is not a committed gluten-free facility. Some brands, like Organic Valley or Straus Family Creamery, are certified gluten-free, or at least get tested for gluten. Again, your best bet is to fastidiously read labels while you're grocery shopping.

Don't knock this one until you try it. Apparently, James Beard liked to add heavy cream to ground beef before he cooked his burgers to make their flavor richer. A more extreme method is to add so much sour cream to your ground beef that you start to question whether you'll be able to make it into a patty. That's right: According to YouTuber Emmymade, the cooking process for this burger is interesting, to use a polite term. The end result, however, is a well-seasoned and crisp (if a touch mushy) burger patty.

In hard times, making food last longer is an important skill. Various methods of stretching meat have resulted in some time-tested staple foods, like scrapple or the Mississippi slugburger. Those products contain more intuitive additives — oats and flour, respectively — than sour cream. This burger, however, dares us to take our imagination further.

To make sour cream, regular cream gets fermented with lactic acid bacteria. We know there are both good and bad bacteria in your gut biome, and you can guess which side lactic acid is on. Lactic acid has been shown to boost immunity when tested in laboratory environments. Now, we're explicitly not saying that lactic acid cures cancer, but lactic acid is great at suppressing tumor cells and boosting regulatory cells like T cells. If lactic acid had a resumé, "making sour cream" and "suppressing tumor cells" would be two impressive-looking items to bring to a job interview. 

It's no secret that fermented foods are good for gut health. There are plenty of reasons to add more fermented foods to your diet. You want those live cultures to help maintain a healthy balance of gut bacteria, which can be hard to achieve in our era of excessive processed foods.

Decades of "got milk" advertising campaigns have taught us that milk is good for your bones and teeth. Turns out the same applies to many dairy products. Sour cream is rich in calcium, vitamin D, and phosphorus, all of which help build strong bones and teeth. We're not saying you should go bragging to your dentist about ordering tacos supreme from Taco Bell, but that sour cream is a bone boost.

Let's talk about phosphorus for a minute because its nutritional benefits might be a little less common knowledge. It's an abundant mineral in the body, second only to calcium, and 85% of it is in your bones and teeth. While most people get plenty of phosphorus from their diets, it's still important to be cognizant of this mineral. Phosphorus levels can fall as a result of diabetes or alcoholism, but too much phosphorus can lead to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease. What's really important is balance. If your calcium and phosphorous counts are in balance, you'll maintain proper bone density. Throw that balance out of whack, and problems arise.

Thanks to the industrialization of many food products and influential cookbooks like Auguste Escoffier's Le Guide Culinaire and Julia Child's The Art of French Cooking, dishes previously regarded as too fancy for middle-class home cooks suddenly became accessible after World War II. Gelatin- and cream-based dishes were all the rage, with interesting concoctions like avocado-sour cream sandwiches and blue cheese mousse getting served at parties.

It's easy (and fun!) to clown post-World War II cooking for its overreliance on aspic and milk fat. You have to consider, however, that cooking this way was thought of as a sign of human progress. Fancy French condiments like hollandaise sauce were now available in packet form. Ambrosia salad — literally named after a magical dish that Greek gods were said to enjoy — could be as simple as some sour cream and a few cans of fruit. People who might have grown up hungry in the Great Depression now had access to canned and dry goods that implicitly promised they would never be hungry again if only they kept the shelves stocked. Why not try to approximate continental European luxury?

Just about any food can be dehydrated and still be edible. This is not so strange, either. Think about it: You've probably used evaporated or condensed milk. Powdered sour cream undergoes a similar process to dry out completely, leaving a fine white powder. Rehydrating it is as simple as adding water, but you can also use whole milk or buttermilk to boost its fat content. This will make your rehydrated sour cream even richer than its regular counterpart. That's great, you might be thinking, but when do you use powdered sour cream? Think of the powder the same way you would cream of tartar or garlic powder. Trust us: It's a great addition to stroganoff.

The real benefit of this product should be obvious. Regular sour cream goes bad really quickly. Powdered sour cream has a years-long shelf life if stored in a cool, dry place. So if you're worried about having a topping for borscht in your apocalypse bunker, fear not. Until the end of the world comes, though, there are plenty of other uses for powdered sour cream.

Perhaps it's fitting that the man who presided over the start of the Great Depression enjoyed such a humble-seeming cookie. Alternatively, it's darkly ironic that the man associated with the campaign promise of "a chicken in every pot" is associated with the Great Depression and such a humble-seeming cookie. Then again, President Herbert Hoover never promised voters anything specific for dinner. Knowing what we know about sour cream and desserts, this cookie could be delicious. The recipe contains vanilla and brown sugar, two of the best dessert ingredients in the world. Could the sour cream cookie be just the thing your afternoon coffee needs?

Look back in history and it's not hard to find presidents enjoying dishes that might seem strange to us. Tastes change, and widely available foods change. Besides, presidents aren't elected because they are culinary icons. Still, we think it's a shame that there wasn't a 1929 equivalent of Conan O'Brien or Stephen Colbert to tell us about President Hoover's fondness for sour cream cookies.

Given sour cream's high fat content — especially compared to yogurt, which is made from a similar process using milk instead of cream — you might not exactly call sour cream a health food. However, thanks to its fermenting process, it does contain probiotics. If that's a word you've heard before but you don't know exactly what it means, don't worry: It's stuff you want to put in your body.

There are all kinds of bacteria in your gut, and probiotics are the good kind. Probiotics can help break down lactose in the small intestine before it reaches the large intestine. This means that even if you have difficulty with lactose, sour cream might not be too harsh for you. Moreover, probiotics have also proved to help manage irritable bowel syndrome and slow down the growth of Helicobacter pylori bacteria. That's the stuff that causes ulcers (in case your Latin's rusty).

Sour cream is often thought of as an Eastern European ingredient. This makes sense, given its importance as a condiment for borscht or potato pancakes. Sour cream is also a crucial garnish in Tex-Mex cuisine — famously, ordering a taco supreme at Taco Bell means adding sour cream and tomatoes. Travel south enough to drop the "Tex," though, and sour cream is replaced by crema. Head over to France, and they'll serve you creme fraîche. The differences between sour cream and crema or creme fraîche are subtle but fascinating.

Mexican crema, although it is thinner and more liquid, has a higher fat content than sour cream. The same goes for creme fraîche. Both are less tangy than sour cream. Crema is slightly sweeter than creme fraîche, making it ideal for smoky or spicy dishes. Creme fraîche is slightly sweeter than sour cream, making it ideal for those luscious French dishes it's always garnishing. Getting three distinct condiments out of the same base ingredient of heavy cream really shows the limitless power of the human imagination  Make sure you've got the right one on hand for whatever cuisine you're enjoying.

Sour cream is a food that's pretty ready to spoil when you open it. If you reach for a tub in the fridge and notice a bunch of green and blue blotches? That's no good. Mold, for anyone who needs to hear it, can be toxic to eat. Luckily, there's a hack to keep sour cream fresh longer. Simply flip the tub of sour cream upside down, which emulates a vacuum effect. Bacteria are harder to grow in this environment, meaning your sour cream stays fresh for longer. This trick also works for cottage cheese, another dairy product that comes in a tub.

The question is: What about that separated liquid whey at the top of your sour cream tub? Does it go back and mingle with the rest of the cream? The answer is no. Unfortunately, gravity exists, even when you're testing the internet's smartest hacks. That whey liquid is at risk of leaking a little from the top of the container — after all, it was designed to be a top, not a bottom. If you're going to flip your sour cream, we advise putting a plate underneath it to catch all that whey. Bare minimum, you're going to want to keep a paper towel on hand when you reach for the sour cream.