What happens if you overbeat heavy cream

Other times you might want a relatively stiff whipped cream, say for spreading atop a chocolate cream pie that will be served in a few hours. The key to achieving the right consistency is whipping the cream for an appropriate amount of time. Exact timing will vary based on the quantity of cream, the machine or tool you use, the speed at which you whip, as well as the temperature of the cream and mixing bowl.

However, soft peaks will always take less time to form than medium or stiff peaks. Watch the cream carefully as the mixer is running at medium-high speed, stopping it periodically to check the consistency. As soon as the whisk starts to leave tracks in the cream, pay close attention; you'll soon see soft peaks.

Our Sift food editor, Susan Reid, encourages those who are new to homemade whipped cream to try whipping it by hand using a whisk for the first time.

This will allow you to see the cream transform slowly in front of your eyes, and you'll be able to recognize the stages of whipped cream development. It can feel like the cream takes forever to firm up. But once it reaches soft peaks, it progresses through the remaining stages rapidly.

This is what whipped cream looks like if you let it mix for too long. It deflates and starts looking clumpy and curd-like in texture. But if you do, and you return to a bowl of slightly yellow, clumpy curds of cream — don't panic! There's no need to throw away the entire batch. What makes whipped cream "break"? The stable foam mixture made up of milk fat and tiny air pockets passes its peak of stability.

Too much mixing causes the structure of the foam to break down, and allows the air to escape. At this point, you may feel like your whipped cream is ruined. You can fix it. With the mixer running at low speed, slowly drizzle cold, unwhipped heavy cream into the mixing bowl. Keep adding cream until the broken whipped cream regains its fluffy texture. How much cream do you need to add to the overwhipped batch until it starts to come together?

Well, that depends on how overwhipped your cream is. This whipped cream was "fixed" by adding more heavy cream after it was whipped too long. It's not quite as light as cream that's whipped perfectly from the start, but it's certainly usable and delicious. A few seconds at medium-high speed right at the end of mixing can help everything come together, but be sure not to overwhip your cream yet again!

This whipped cream is too far gone to try to return it to a whipped state. The mixture looks pale yellow and whey has begun to separate from the curds. Continue beating your overwhipped cream until the butterfat starts to form solid clumps. Pour off any of the liquid; this is essentially buttermilk. You can use it in baking: try it in some of our favorite buttermilk recipes. Fold the chunk of butter over onto itself a few times until it starts to look smooth.

Then knead the mass gently in an ice water bath or fold it under cool water to remove excess liquid. You can go ahead and use the freshly whipped soft butter as a creamy, decadent garnish for practically any baked good. You can even add a little salt or vanilla for flavor, if you like. Refrigerate your butter, knowing that homemade butter has a much shorter shelf life than the store-bought variety; use it in about three to five days if possible.

So I just kept on mixing it until it was completely separated into thick yellow butter and thin white buttermilk, strained it, and pressed it into a jar. Luckily we always have extra pints of heavy cream in our test fridge, so I was able to start over again.

But this all took up way more of my afternoon than I wanted it to, and just because I broke the first rule of making whipped cream: never step away from the mixer! I find it's actually safer to make whipped cream with a handheld electric mixer—or even go for the arm workout of whipping it by hand. That way, I can't possibly be tempted to multi-task and will keep my eyes on the bowl to make sure I stop whipping at the exact moment of soft peak perfection.

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. High temperatures can change the texture and flavor of the cream, so food companies often add congealing agents such as carrageenan to return the cream to its original viscosity.

These agents could work in tandem with the microbes to thicken the cream, speeding up the process. Make sure to check your heavy cream labels! The more pasteurized the cream is, the less the added cultures have to compete with.

Ultra-pasteurization effectively wipes the microbial slate clean. With no other microbes to beat out, our cultures—added in the form of buttermilk—could be free to eat all of the lactose in sight, without having to share. It's a fluke. Cream is a biological product, and biology can vary from case to case.

Eventually, the pasteurized version did thicken; it just took a lot longer and wasn't as thick as the ultra-pasteurized version. After my experiment, I found myself with a lot of acidulated cream. So I took a batch and whipped it in my stand mixer until it separated into butter. The result was a more flavorful and complex butter, and the byproduct was a bonus supply of cultured buttermilk.

This stuff is worth saving. Let it drain off of your butter and store it in a jar. Use it to make pancakes , fried chicken , or cornbread.

Some say you can even use it to treat a sunburn. Whatever you do, just don't throw it away. You have probably read or heard that you should chill you equipment and cream before attempting to whip it. This is reasonable advice, given that you are building a structure that is held together by fat, and fat likes to melt. Keeping everything cold when making whipped cream or butter will help keep the fat in the solid phase.

In the case of whipped cream, this is crucial. If your fat backbone begins to soften and liquidize, the structure of globules can collapse, releasing the air bubbles and deflating. As for butter, keeping everything cold helps to keep things more manageable. What's easier to hold in your hand, refrigerated butter or melted butter? This is especially important during rinsing. If you rinse with warm even tepid water, you melt fat and wash it down the drain.

The easiest way to avoid this tragedy is with the ice water method described above. You now have the knowledge to make five delicious dairy products, all from just one or two ingredients. Knowledge, my friends, is power. Delicious, delicious power. Actively scan device characteristics for identification.

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