An Easy Instant Pot Sour Cream Recipe Using Just Real Cream and Starter
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Homemade sour cream is really very easy to make. By making it ourselves, we know exactly what is in it, since it’s just high quality cream cultured with a real starter culture.

INGREDIENTS
We use an Horizon cream and a starter culture from Cultures for Health. The quality of the ingredients you start with is very important, especially when there are only two ingredients in the item you are making. And brands differ. So, we mention the brands and explain why on our page on ingredients. Sour cream that you can buy in the grocery store is often half milk. We prefer to make the sour cream entirely of cream, but you could make it with half Horizon milk as well.
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MAKING SOUR CREAM IN AN INSTANT POT
We use an Instant Pot because it holds the temperature just where you need it for hours, making culturing very easy. Sour cream is made from a mesophilic culture, which translates to “medium-loving”, indicating that it thrives at medium temperatures and is destroyed at a higher temperature. The culture thrives at temperatures between 74 and 77 degrees F, and is destroyed at 113 degrees F. The Instant Pot Ultra has a yogurt setting that can be adjusted to low, where it will maintain a constant temperature of 90 degrees. This makes culturing sour cream very easy.
Because this is a cultured product, it is important that everything is clean. Start with fresh cream that is not near its expiration date. Remove the sealing ring on the Instant Pot lid. Thoroughly wash the inner pot, the lid and the sealing ring with very hot water.
The cream is first heated to 145 degrees F. This causes the proteins to tighten and will produce a thicker sour cream. The temperature is then allowed to drop to 77 degrees F before the starter culture is added. Then the mixture is kept at 90 degrees F for 16 hours while it thickens.
It is possible to make successive batches from a few tablespoons of a previous batch, but we always start with fresh starter culture to make sure it is strong and the cream is kept clean. The starter culture comes in powdered form in tiny packets and conveniently stores for months in the refrigerator. It also comes with instructions that we don’t exactly follow.
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Photos by Tony Fitzgerald Photography