How to avoid cream breaking / splitting in oven?
A peculiar Swedish recipe calls for ladling curry flavored whipped cream over chicken and baking in the oven, at 225c for 20-30 minutes typically. During my childhood, this resulted in a creamy, emulsified result.
Now, when trying to recreate it, it always comes out thin, with visible butterfat and coagulated proteins. Does anyone know why this happens? When reducing cream in the pan, this never happens. Id suspect the whipping to be the culprit, but it was never a problem during my childhood.
Should I try lower heat for a longer time, higher heat for even shorter time, or could it be that I use enameled ceramic cookware while my mother used ovensafe glass cookware?
Best Answer
The splitting of cream depends a lot on the ratio of fat to water in the sauce, and can be influenced through stabilizers. Some possible reasons for the change are:
- the chicken or the bacon of your childhood might have exuded less liquid. Nowadays, chicken meat gets injected with water for "plumpness", and that water seeps out in the oven. The same happens with bacon.
- the chicken of your childhood might have been fattier. Due to customer preference and economic pressure, today's food animals are raised to have lower amounts of fat than several decades ago.
- your mother might have been using a different recipe, or might have stabilized the cream somehow. This can be done with packages of "whipped cream stabilizer" from the supermarket, or adding some flour or starch to the sauce, or using other thickeners. Or she might have been using a brand of curry made with emulsifiers.
My suggestion for you is to try some kind of thickener. The simplest way would be to dredge the chicken and bacon through flour and see if this helps. If not, consider making a slurry with a tablespoon or two from the cream and some flour or starch, or some emulsifier like xanthan, and folding it into the whipped cream.
Pictures about "How to avoid cream breaking / splitting in oven?"
How do you keep cream from splitting in the oven?
Starches like flour or cornstarch help stabilize the milk emulsion. This will prevent it from separating. A common technique is to thicken your sauce or soup with roux before adding the milk. This changes the makeup of the liquid and prevents curdling.Why did my cream split when cooking?
Cream curdling or splitting generally occurs when cream is heated at a very high heat which results in the cream taking on the appearance of Cottage Cheese. The good news is that there is a solution. And that solution is Bulla Cooking Cream 300ml!Will heavy cream curdle in the oven?
This is an easy one, because the fat content of heavy cream is so high that you can heat it, boil it, and even reduce it to your heart's content. It won't break, or separate. But do be aware that high acid additions \u2014 like citrus, wine, or tomatoes for example \u2014 might curdle it a bit.Why does heated cream separate?
Generally if the cream separates, that means you've heated it too much -- either too hot, or too long. Also, if you're making a cream-based pasta sauce, the standard method is to add the cream last to the other cooked ingredients in the sauce. That way you're less likely to overcook the cream.Top 5 Cake Baking Mistakes! | Preppy Kitchen
Sources: Stack Exchange - This article follows the attribution requirements of Stack Exchange and is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
Images: Pixabay, Anna Urlapova, Decha Huayyai, Victor Freitas