How To Make Whipped Cream

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Watch this video to learn how to make whipped cream from scratch, using heavy cream and a whisk.

You're going to need just a few tools. First, a very very very cold bowl - I actually keep it in the freezer for five to ten minutes just to get the chill on the bowl. The other thing I'll be using is a whisk. This is a large whisk: it's big, it's wider. I also put this in the freezer to make sure it's very cold as well.

We're using heavy cream, which has 40% milk fat. That 40% milk fat is what is going to get your whipped cream to whip up and hold its volume.

I'm going to start by pouring my heavy cream into the ice-cold bowl, and then you're going to tilt the bowl slightly, and you're going to whisk in an up-and-over fashion. An up-and-over fashion is just basically to aerate; air is going to come into the bowl itself, and then the fat molecules will form around the whipped cream. That's what will give it volume and hold its shape.

You'll see that the whipped cream starts to thicken up as we continue whisking, and as it thickens up it's going to start to hold some lines it it.

So now basically we're looking at a medium peak whipped cream, and you can tell that because it'll basically hold a peak on your whisk. You can see that it has a nice straight peak, and if you look in the bowl you can see where the tines of the whisk pass through.

This would be usable for decorating the top of a cake, or for garnishing strawberries with mint; this is where you would use your whipped cream.