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In the UK we have double cream which has about 42% fat and whips up beautifully so that its quite stable and can be piped on top of cupcakes and in between cake layers without being squeezed out by the cake layer.

I’m now in a (hot) country that doesn’t have double cream. It has general whipping cream that has a fat content of at most 33% and gives me very soft airy whipped cream which is not what I’m after. However, they also sell a very thick type of cream that you can spread with a knife. Like the extra thick double cream you get in the UK.

If I mix the thick cream and the whipping cream and whip them together, will I get a more stable and denser whipped cream?

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  • It is unclear from your question what you mean by "a very thick type of cream that you can spread with a knife". Is it made from just milk, churned, and interrupted before becoming butter, or is it something else entirely, like mascarpone, commercial kaymak, or cottage cheese? Also, see these related questions: cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/34341, cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/48871 and cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/29395
    – rumtscho
    Sep 25, 2022 at 9:42
  • Yes it’s made from cows milk. Im a little hazy on the science behind making cream, but it’s not mascarpone or any other type of dairy, it’s just a very very thick cream. It has the consistency of cream cheese, thick but soft enough that you can spread it with a knife on toast or anything else you want. But it’s pure cream. Not whipped or anything, not airy, just very thick spreadable cream. Not pourable. Hope I’ve explained myself 😅 and not made it sound even more confusing. Sep 25, 2022 at 9:53
  • OK, I wrote now a complete answer. I am still very surprised by the idea of a place which doesn't have double cream but hastriple(?) cream, but anyway, I covered it in the answer.
    – rumtscho
    Sep 25, 2022 at 10:17
  • Growing up on a farm in a subtropical country, I remember we would take our full cream milk from the morning's milking and put it through a centrifugal separator. The ratio of cream to milk would depend on some setting of the machine, but the milk would still have some cream that would rise to the top on standing, while the cream was saved in glass jars in the fridge, left for a day or three during which time it would turn fairly solid/spreadable. I believe some fermentation process might have started to take place here. When enough of the latter was collected, it would be churned into butter.
    – frIT
    Sep 26, 2022 at 14:57

1 Answer 1

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It depends on what the "thick cream" actually is.

If the cream was made by taking milk (plain or cultured) and then mechanically churning it to a specific consistency - basically making dairy cream with more fat than your double cream - it will work. Any percentage cream or milk is mixable with any other, and you can calculate the resulting percentage in simple linear fashion. That is, if you mix equal parts 30% cream and 50% cream, the result will behave like 40% cream. The same will work if it was made by scooping up the butterfat risen to the top of cooked milk - which is the original, homemade meaning of "kaymak", but is almost never made, because of the huge expenditure of milk.

I am a bit skeptical about your product being exactly that though, so I will also mention other cases. First, if it is indeed made by churning, but the actual goal is butter, and it is simply not-yet-quite butter, it is questionable whether it will work, but I suspect that it won't. An elderly relative used to make homemade butter that way, and it was unlike commercial butter, but white, with higher water content, spreadable - and with a clearly crystalline structure, with the butterfat already coalesced. If you live in a place where this product is made but called "cream" instead of "butter", you can try it, but the chance of success is not all that high.

The second thing that could work is mascarpone. It is nominally a cheese, but in fact its texture combines with cream quite well, and the mixture can be whipped (I have tried it personally). Also, the taste is so bland that the result will taste like whipped cream, not salty or with cheesy notes.

There are a lot of other dairy-based spreads though, made in different ways, and pretty much none of them will work. Some are actually cheeses, like cream cheese (not only the American style, but also variations like Krema on the Balkans), ricotta, and others. There are also cultured dairy products (créme fraîche), reduced milks and creams like katmach and evaporated milk, and modern technological creations that use thickeners (frequently labelled just "spread" in the supermarket, but modern kaymak from the store is also made that way). If you don't know exactly how your spread is produced, it is more likely to be one of those, than to be churned-cream-halfway-to-butter.

So, if I were you, I would certainly do it if I knew it for sure to be a churned cream. Else, I would not expect it to work, but maybe make an experimental batch just to see what happens, fully prepared for it to not whip.

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    Thank you so much for your answer! I do agree it’s strange they have this extra thick ‘triple’ cream but not double cream. So the container says ‘fresh cream’. Ingredients are listed as fresh cream, fresh cows milk, thickener (e407) and vitamin d3. I’m pretty sure this means it’s real cream. Whether its this thick because of the fat content or because of the thickener, I’ll have to experiment and see. Thanks! Sep 25, 2022 at 11:58
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    e407 is carrageenan * foodadditives.net/thickeners/carrageenan
    – Ecnerwal
    Sep 25, 2022 at 15:06
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    That sounds like it will do the trick @Hobbybaker91, give it a shot and see.
    – GdD
    Sep 25, 2022 at 16:25
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    @Hobbybaker91 you should be able to easily find it out - the nutrition label lists the fat per 100 gram. If it is, say, 50 grams, you can mix it with your 30% cream to get 40% double cream. If it says something lower than 30%, then you will be actually reducing the fat content if you mix it with whipping cream. In such a case, could still try and see what happens, since carrageenan is suitable as a stabilizer for whipped cream, but it is risky.
    – rumtscho
    Sep 26, 2022 at 14:47
  • The container says ‘minimum 30% fat’ 😕. I’m hoping this might mean the actual fat content ‘could’ be higher. But I guess I’ll have to experiment and see what happens. Sep 30, 2022 at 21:09

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