I sincerely thought I'd had clotted cream before, years ago. For whatever bizarre reason, the basement grocery in the building where I work is selling these tiny little bottles of clotted cream, so on a whim, and guessing the cream would have little in the way of carbs (1 g of carbs per 28 g of cream, in fact), I bought a bottle, brought it home, and tasted it.
Damn. Whatever I thought I'd had before (whipped cream bordering on butter?), that wasn't clotted cream, not by a long shot. Clotted cream tastes like nothing I've tasted. Sure, it has a texture that's not totally unfamiliar—somewhere in the neighborhood of soft-but-firm, spreadable butter or mascarpone—but the taste is... I don't even know how to describe it. A bit grassy or even loamy, and paradoxically, a taste that's almost as if the cream had arrived that way fresh from the cow. That's impossible, of course: to make clotted cream, you need hours of simmering (see Chef John's video), so "fresh from the cow" is right out. And yet... that's the vibe I got all the same. Clotted cream is very, shall we say, farm-y in taste.
I should also note that, by itself, clotted cream is no big shakes, but I can absolutely see how it goes with a good strawberry jam or preserves on a nice, lumpy, rough-looking scone (I'm aware there's some contention over how to pronounce scone; when I say it, I rhyme it with "phone," so come at me, haters).
And by the way, scones should be rough-looking—none of this Starbucks machine-cut, assembly-line bullshit. (In case you haven't guessed, I hate Starbucks scones.) An English scone should look as if an American drop biscuit has just gotten out of Royal Military Academy Sandhurst—a bit trimmer and more shapely than a drop biscuit, and arguably a bit sweeter-tasting, too—but still looking ready to handle Mos Eisley ruffians. If a scone is a drop biscuit after military training, a drop biscuit is a scone gone to seed: relaxed and tasty, but fat around the waist like a vet who lets himself go after leaving the military. Both are delicious to me, without a doubt, but I'd give scones the edge.*
Back to the main topic of this post—clotted cream. So now that I've had the bottled stuff, I want to make my own clotted cream. Look out for photos of that sometime in the coming months. And if I time the clotted cream with a cheat day, maybe I'll make scones, too, and possibly even some sort of jam. O, sinful delight!
(Scone-recipe video here.)
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*So, how can I know scones so well, but not clotted cream? Remember I'm a Yank, so my experience of other cultures is sometimes piecemeal. My apologies to the scone-eating folks who know that scones without clotted cream is like a chicken with no legs or wings. In fact, those above-mentioned Starbucks scones were among the first scones I ever tried. Blech.
Scones with jam and clotted cream are definitely a treat, but you don't have to have them that way. Buttered scones are also very much a thing.
ReplyDeleteAnd I don't want to toot my own horn, but I make a pretty mean scone. Next time you drop by my place, when things have calmed down a bit, we'll have some fresh scones right out of the oven.
(As for pronunciation, I've sort of been influenced by the shorter British vowel, as I was introduced to scones in London, but I don't fuss about it.)
kevin, clotted cream is easy to make, but maybe not easy to make in korea. you bake on low (175-180) deg f heat a shallow pan of heavy whipping cream for 12 hours. drain whey. the rest is clotted cream. i know ovens are (or at least were bc i dont know about now) rare and i dont know how easy it is to obtain heavy cream. -hahna
ReplyDeleteHahna,
ReplyDeleteSounds like what Chef John says in his video. My oven has a one-hour timer that I'd have to reset and reset, but I imagine it's possible to cook something for 12 hours as long as I'm there to rest the timer every hour.