The Search for Heavy Cream
Trying to find familiar comfort in Oaxaca.
Homesickness comes in waves and I’m particularly struck by my yearning for New York in September, October, and December. For the mournfully short span of time that sees the slow death of the summer and its transition into autumn, the city is an incredible place to be, and while November in New York is frankly terrible, a time of bad traffic, bad weather, and bad travel, NYC is so fully decked out for celebration in December that it makes up for the arrival of the cold.
There’s a lot I miss about New York (and a fair bit I don’t) but the holidays, and the fantasy of the holidays, where everything is impossibly perfect and peaceful and cradling, exacerbates that pain. The ache is made even worse by the fact that it’s disappointingly difficult to obtain a wide variety of cooking ingredients here. This is a time of year when you want to dive into traditions and it’s frustrating to not be able to obtain what I need to execute cherished, unhealthy recipes. And no ingredient has been harder to obtain than heavy cream.
The problem isn’t necessarily one of availability. Mexico loves fat, it loves dairy, and it loves cakes and pastries. I can easily get heavy cream at the supermarket and it comes packaged exactly as you’d find it in the United States. The problem is that the quality is very low, and it’s been so adulterated by preservatives, gums, thickeners, stabilizers, and, weirdly, dyes, that I simply can’t bring myself to use it.
We eat a diet largely free from processed foods and preservatives, but that’s more about lifestyle and less about strict adherence to any sort of specific health-driven philosophy. We eat shelf-stable tostadas and chips and buy canned tomatoes, processed sugar, and all kinds of things that I’m sure a person with a more rigid diet would find appalling. But I don’t find most processed foods to taste all that good, or to be that satisfying, and that’s especially true in my eyes when it comes to dairy.
When you take a thing like milk—a product naturally loaded with fat—and adulterize it with corn syrup, dyes, thickeners, and preservatives, it becomes less enjoyable to eat. It wobbles unappealingly, coating the tongue in a strange way. It certainly doesn’t work correctly in recipes, changing the ultimate texture of a dish or a dessert in a manner that is often unappealing and sometimes unpredictable. Some starches are activated when they reach a certain temperature and I don’t want a gluey, pasty chowder, just as I don’t want whipped cream with the consistency of Cool Whip. Mexican heavy cream is so shockingly transmogrified by industrial processes that I can’t bring myself to use it.
Heavy cream is an ingredient so easy to obtain that people in the U.S. take it for granted, and there’s no good substitute when it comes to baking. When you need it, you need it, and our desire to have cream has led to some frankly desperate behavior. When we visited Italy and saw shelf-stable UHF (ultra high frequency) pasteurized cream on the shelf we brought home with us as many boxes as we could manage. When we returned to NYC this past September and saw the same product on the shelf at Trader Joe’s we bought literally every box they had, which I subsequently wrote an article about for the food site Simply Recipes.
I’ve complained about this to a great many people in Oaxaca and in return have largely received either blithe responses encouraging me to just use the supermarket stuff (nope!) or commiserating that yes, it’s very hard to find. It got to the point where I started to wonder if I’d need to find a farmer with a cow and say to them, can you please sell me this product?
Yesterday, hoping to buy chicken raised by a particular farm, we visited the tienda for an organic farm called Biohuacal and I was shocked to find them selling heavy cream labeled as being without preservatives or additives. After over a year I finally found what I was looking for!
It was only this morning, though, that I began to wonder if the dairy sold by Biohuacal is pasteurized. I’ve sent them a message to ask about the product but haven’t yet received a reply. Without a confirmation I’ll have no choice but to pasteurize it myself on the stovetop, an easy enough process but yet another small complication in my quest for good, normal heavy cream.
Christmas is in five days, a holiday I plan to celebrate with whipped cream. I hope that softly whipped mounds of previously unattainable dairy will ease the pain of being away from New York. Certainly, weather reports saying that the city is about to have temperatures in the low 20s have helped me feel good about being in Mexico over Christmas. We’re away from home and have less dairy than I’d like, but at least the sun is shining.
I've been in Puerto Vallarta for a year and I'm having the very same issue! People look at me as though I'm crazy when I ask and go on to recommend Lyncott. The ingredients are horrifying. I caved in once and tried to use it. Only having a whisk, which works just fine with unadulterated heavy cream, my results were runny and weirdly-textured. I haven't completely given up hope, but I'm close.
I came in expecting to be able to rant that I couldn't find it either! I wanted to make a proper American cheesecake. It's not as common in my locals it seems... Glad you've found it, even if you've chosen a healthier habit.