Recently I tried my wife’s recipe for cheese cake, which suggests that plain yogurt can be substituted for half the amount of cream.
Yogurt being a lot cheaper than cream in these parts, I gave it a try and was pleased at my success.
Alas, the same trick does not work for all dishes.
Tonight I found out that you cannot substitute yogurt for cream when making pumpkin soup.
Not a complete disaster, but certainly not the way pumpkin soup should taste.
No wonder the kids left half of it uneaten.
What successes and failures have you had experimenting with substituting ingredients?
You can substitute baking powder for the cream of tartar + baking soda on a one to one basis.
For example, if a recipe calls for 2 teaspoons of cream of tartar and 1 teaspoon of baking soda you can substitute 3 teaspoons of baking powder for them.
You can substitute thick Greek yogurt for the buttermilk in buttermilk pancakes. In fact, the yogurt pancakes are superior - they simultaneously have more body and are lighter.
Some apple juice or water with a little cider vinegar added can be a good substitute for wine if you have no wine for a recipe. Just make sure it’s not super-sweet apple juice.
If you’re making homemade granola and are trying to cut back on the sugar content, use unsweetened applesauce as the binder rather than honey or sugar or syrup. It sticks things together well and if you want your granola sweeter, you can always add sugar when you eat it.
Yeah, yogurts just generally substitutes well for buttermilk or sour cream. They are all similar products, regular milk or cream that is inoculated with a bacteria to sour it. You can also add kefir to the list. Now using it for regular cream will change the flavor noticeably, but with something like cheesecake, the sweetness of the cake and the fact that it’s not unusual to use sour milk products in making it (like sour cream cheesecake), it’ll be fine. I like it in pumpkin soup, too, but it is a much more obvious substitution. (I sometimes make a spicy curried type of pumpkin soup and Ladd yogurt to it instead of cream, as I like the zip and lightness of yogurt vs the silky, but heavy, creaminess of heavy cream.)
When my mother made meatloaf, one of the things she usually added to it was a couple spoonfuls of pancake syrup. Don’t ask me why, but she did, and the finished product still tasted like meat.
The first time I made my own meatloaf, going by guess and by gosh, I found that we had no pancake syrup, so I used a couple spoonfuls of honey. Voilà: sweetloaf.
It wasn’t good.
Did not know that!
Thanks. That’s really handy to know.
That’s a thought. Maybe I should have tried adding a little cumin to it. One substitution that I can vouch for:
I love Lasagna, but in Japan, lasagna pasta tends to be pretty pricey.
My wife taught me to use gyoza dumpling pastry, which is super cheap and makes a nice lasagna pasta substitute.
Yes, the two parts cream of tartar + one part baking soda is a recipe for baking powder. Most commercial baking powders, though, are other chemicals. They are interchangeable, but do give slightly different results.
ETA: Do people use cream of tartar for anything else?
I’ve known for years that self-rising flour is regular flour with some baking powder in it and I’ve successfully made a number of recipes that call for self-rising flour by adding a few tsps of baking powder in with the flour.
A few weeks ago, I tried to make my own enchilada sauce, as the canned versions are quite salty and we are shooting for <2000mg of sodium per day in the Stickler household at the moment. The recipe I found online called for a tbs of oil and a few tbs of self-rising flour to make, I assume, some sort of roux. So, nervous but trusting that everything generally turns out all right in the end, I added a pinch of baking powder to the flour and cooked it up. Woowee, that was some bitter enchilada sauce! The enchiladas were eaten in short order regardless and I was told they were ‘just delicious’, but I’m not dumb, I know what my tongue tasted.
I add it to meringues to make them whip up quicker and though I haven’t made them in a long time, I recall them being a requirement for snickerdoodles, but I’d have to dig out my recipe because if it calls for baking soda then there it’s also just making baking powder.
Yes, they are required for snickerdoodles (but the recipe also contains baking soda–at least my favorite recipe which I’ve made three times in about as many weeks already. My last batch just ran out–time to bake some more.) That’s one recipe where it doesn’t taste right (to me) if using commercial baking powder instead of cream of tartar + baking soda.
And, ah yes, whipped egg whites. Forgot about that one.
Having failed to purchase sufficient vanilla extract before a baking binge one time, I discovered that substituting almond extract, rum extract, or lemon extract for 1/2 of the vanilla in baked goods can give them an interesting twist. People compliment all the time on my toll house cookies and sugar cookies which contain almond extract and lemon extract, respectively.
I also like to sub in a little molasses for some of the brown sugar in various baked goods recipes, too.
This doesn’t exactly count as “something else”, but I have a recipe for"baking mix" which is essentially Bisquick, that calls for cream of tartar in addition to baking powder, so it isn’t just a baking powder substitute.
I like the homemade stuff because I use whole wheat flour and butter for the white flour and shortening. That doesn’t make it healthy, but it’s a little healthier and it tastes much nicer.
Is there another basic (as in ph > 7) ingredient in the mix like baking soda? Otherwise, I wonder what it’s in for, other than a bit of tartness. I guess it’s also used to keep sugar from crystalizing, but that wouldn’t make sense for a Bisquick-type mix.
If you are making something that uses egg whites but not yolks, you can take two yolks and one tablespoon of water and sub it in meny recipes for a whole egg.
If you have bread flour but want all purpose flour, one ounce of cornstarch and eight ounces of bread flour make nine ounces of “regular” flour.
You need buttermilk but don’t have any? Fifteen tablespoons of whole milk and one tablespoon of lemon juice make an adequate sub in most baked goods.
Many years ago, a friend invited me over for mushroom stroganoff. He’d bought all the ingredients, but when he went to get the sour cream, it was gone. “Oh,” said his doofus roommate, “I was hungry so I ate it.” Yep, dude scarfed down an entire tub of sour cream straight.
My friend was pissed. “How am I gonna make this stroganoff?” he asked. I thought about it. Sour cream is just a thick sour fatty glob, right? Well, so is mayonnaise. It wouldn’t be exactly the same, but it should be close enough, should be an acceptable substitute.
tl;dr version: for the love of Christ, mayonnaise is not an acceptable substitute for sour cream.
I also use Cream of Tatar if the pH of my lotion is off and I need to acidify it for the preservative to work. It doesn’t seem to affect the texture or odor of the lotion any.
I’ve been doing it so long, it didn’t feel like a substitution anymore, just a recipe, but when I started making homemade ranch dressing, I discovered that I can use half as much mayo and fill it in with plain Greek yogurt. Gives it a little extra zip, so it’s not a perfect substitution, but a taste we actually prefer.