Longlife Cream no more????

A._Badger

Good news (for some)! I found Lakeland UHT cream in a branch of Morrisons yesterday. 250ml containers. The price was sixty-something pence (the receipt has gone walkabout).

Frummuss

I too have been regretting the disappearance of longlife cream - very useful to have in the store cupboard for the occasions when a sudden impulse to prepare some exotic dish requiring it occurs and it is a long time till shopping day.

I am planning to meet the deficit, should such an impulse occur, by making my own cream. Up in the attic I have a cream machine, acquired by my mother before World War II, a gadget that pumps a warm mixture of milk and butter through a special valve, emulsifying it in the process. It is designed to make mayonnaise too. One pumped away, jumping when the gadget missed a beat and hiccupped.

In the 60s and later, when fresh cream was expensive and not so available as now, we used a blender to achieve the same result. I do not have a note of the proportions we used but Bee Nilson in The Penguin Cookery Book (1952) has a recipe for the cream machine of 2 oz. of butter or margarine (!) to 1/4 pint of milk for thin cream and 4 oz. of butter or margarine to 1/4 pint of milk. Fat and milk were warmed till the fat melted and then cooled to blood heat and pumped through the machine. We put it in the blender instead. She suggests that for whipping a level tsp. of gelatine should be added to the thick-cream mixture before heating and that the cream should be beaten lightly when it was cold but not set. We never tried this but whipped the thick cream.

ramasaig

Two months on and still no Long Life cream available anywhere. Our local shop on Mull doesn't stock fresh cream because there's insufficient turnover, so we are really stuck.

Edwardia

Actually this is a great thread..bit of contention, some useful advice, memories, suggestions even a recipe

As a low carber I'm doing my best to consume the annual output of Rodda's creamery all on my tod hehe

I've not seen sterilised cream for years but as a kid my paternal grandmother would always always produce home-made trifle plus tinned mandarin oranges and fruit cocktail with sterilised tinned cream every other Sunday. It didn't taste quite like cream but it was quite thick.

Never experienced Elmlea but having been reared on plastic-tasting Flora I'm dead against fake cream and butter and not about to try either. My MIL buys that Anchor stuff with the brandy in at Christmas and it's vile.

powdies

Same experience here with Asda and long life cream. We eventually asked an assistant last week who told us we were WRONG - Asda would NEVER put a long life product on the chilled shelves. She had nothing to say when I pointed out that long life Elmlea was stored on the chilled shelves! She continued to argue despite me pointing out I'd bought it until just before Xmas. And continued when my partner reappeared from elsewhere and backed me up. No, clearly we were WRONG (mad/stupid).

My own view is that it's a ploy to get you to buy more cream. Not only does long life keep before opened, it also keeps way longer in the fridge, whereas fresh goes off in no time, so you have to waste it and buy more and add to the supermarket's profits! We've been forced to buy Elmlea but it just doesn't taste like the real thing.

The health argument is b&*&*cks of course! Any UHT product has less bacteria because of the Ultra High Temperatures it has been heated to - that's why it last longer of course - so by the same token it is clearly also healthier.

I have a cream maker for my Kenwood Chef which I was about to eBay before all this happened but I've just changed my mind and will be trying it for the first time this weekend. (homogenises long life butter and milk, if anyone is interested).

Last actual long life cream we have seen was in Morrisons - it was in little tetrapack cartons (like UHT milk comes in). They don't seem to have online shopping? so we'll be trying there this weekend.

powdies

Kenwood chef cream maker uses UNSALTED butter - not long life, that was a typo! Sounds like it does the same thing as the previous contributor's cream-maker but without the manual pumping. It's part A927 if any of you have a KC - available quite freely on eBay but I don't know if you can buy them new any more.

A._Badger

powdies wrote: »

Same experience here with Asda and long life cream. We eventually asked an assistant last week who told us we were WRONG - Asda would NEVER put a long life product on the chilled shelves. She had nothing to say when I pointed out that long life Elmlea was stored on the chilled shelves! She continued to argue despite me pointing out I'd bought it until just before Xmas. And continued when my partner reappeared from elsewhere and backed me up. No, clearly we were WRONG (mad/stupid). .

I had a very similar experience in ASDA which, clearly, needs to send some of its staff for customer service training. My wife and I were treated to the same 'poor idiots' routine when we pointed out that Elmlea was no more cream than the was content of the Castrol Magnatec bottles in the car products aisle. And probably about as good to eat, too...

Incidentally, we tried the Morrisons stuff - not very good, I'm afraid - thin and watery. Particularly as Morrisons is a trek for us (and our local branch looks like the aftermath of an explosion in a warehouse, and makes early Lidl branches feel like Fortnum and Mason) we haven't bothered going back.

I'm sticking by my initial guess that there was just one UHT cream supplier which has closed down.

twiz21

We used to have tinned sterilized cream at christmas time when I was a child - we had no fridge. I didn't like it at all.

When I was studying home economics at a catering college in the late seventies, we could not use real cream in our cooking as it was too expensive.
Instead, we used cream made from Whale's fat. It was a powder which we mixed with water to the desired consistency. It tasted disgusting - but it looked like the real thing. It was served up with deserts in the canteen at lunchtime too.

Approved foods have 1 Litre cartons of Kerrymaid real dairy single cream, 39p each or 3 for a pound.

Clowance

ramasaig wrote: »

Two months on and still no Long Life cream available anywhere.

It is still available at Makro (not sure about costco) in large packs - 1l costing about £3.60 I think, for whipping cream, online showing

• Horeca Select UHT Single Cream 1ltr £1.87
  
  hth someone, I will use it at Christmas.
  
  

hilstep2000

Poundstretcher sell carnation cream in a tin for 59p. It's very nice, I always keep some in the cupboard.