On Milk Products in China (Including a recipe for sour cream that I discovered/ made up)

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Milk products, except for yogurt, are not a common thing in China. I don’t know why Chinese people love yogurt so much, but they don’t go for the other milk products. I have been told that they think that westerns smell bad because of how much milk we consume. (Click here to read my blog post about pronoun troubles). But they LOVE yogurt! Picture this, you go the supermarket and there are three cold sections of dairy products, but 7/8^th of it is yogurt. The last eighth consists butter/margarine, cheese, milk, and a smattering of other milk products. At times this eighth is non-existent and at times it has all of these milk products, it just depends on the day. Now if you want forever milk, milk that does not need to be refrigerated, you can get that too, but that would not be in these cold dairy sections.

All this being said, it is nigh impossible to get certain milk products, such as sour cream, here, so you make your own sour cream. In the US, I would never have considered making my own sour cream, but it is actually not that hard. Mix whipping cream and vinegar together until it tastes like sour cream then whip it together and add cream of tarter to help thicken it. Easy, right?

Well this past week I made baked potatoes for dinner, and I wanted to make sour cream to go with them. However, I didn't have whipping cream, and I didn’t have the time or the energy to go get whipping cream. I did have plain yogurt that I was never planning on eating.

You see my favorite brand of yogurt comes in packages with 4 or 5 packages of yogurts that are one flavor and one of a different flavor. I don’t know why, but it does. Well, one package came with plain yogurt. I have only had one experience with plain yogurt and that was when I accidentally bought plain yogurt thinking that it was vanilla yogurt. I was sorely disappointed because plain yogurt in the US is rather gross in my opinion.

Anyways, I decided to make sour cream using my plain yogurt. What I did not realize was that plain yogurt in China is not a disgusting bland flavor like it is in the US. It is actually sweet, so I simply added extra vinegar to compensate for the sweetness of the yogurt (I think that I, perhaps, overcompensated). Another thing that my friends in the US need to realize is that yogurt in China has a completely different consistency than yogurt in the US. It is more like a smoothie. When you think of Chinese yogurt think of go-gurt; basically Chinese yogurt is drinkable.

Anyways, I mixed my sweet plain yogurt and vinegar together to create a sour cream tasting liquid, but it would not thicken even though I added cream of tarter. So I did some research online about how to thicken sour cream. The problem with doing this is that most recipe websites in English are written for people living in the west, so they assume that I have access to products that I don’t. Finally, I found one website that said I could thicken sour cream with flour, so I tried that, and it worked. The flour gave it a little bit of a grainy flavor, but depending on what you are using the sour cream for, the grainy flavor would not necessarily matter. I would like to experiment with this recipe a bit, but this is a much cheaper and much more convenient solution than using whipping cream. A package of this yogurt costs 2 kuai, about $0.30, while a container of whipping cream costs 30-40 kuai, about $4-6. Also, you can buy yogurt at every Chinese store, but only some Chinese stores have whipping cream and those that do have it do not have it on a consistent basis. Therefore, yogurt is a very nice alternative.

Thus goes my sour cream creating adventure. Please feel free to experiment with this recipe, and if you have any other ideas for thickening sour cream please let me know.