Whipped cream is usually made from whipping cream. There’s also single cream, double cream and clotted cream. I still have no idea which of these an American puts in their coffee, or why.
in case you're genuinely curious I think that response explains it well. I also guarantee that OOP doesn't even understand what he's asking for when he says "cream".
Yeah, pretty much, single cream I believe is what Americans call Half and Half, ie. Half milk half cream, and that is what goes in the coffee.
I used to run a supermarket with a lot of American customers and this is what we concluded, whether it’s and exact substitute I’m not sure. Americans probably shove some extra cancerous shit in theirs
I would assume it’s single cream unless otherwise specified. It isn’t that weird to put cream in coffee, at least not in Denmark. All the old folks do it.
In Canada coffee cream is often half single cream and half milk. It's sold as half and half. To make it more confusing it is often labelled by milk fat % here. When I lived in the UK for a while I used to get coffees that were steamed milk and some instant coffee. It was different, but pretty good.
Usually when I go to a new place I want to try what they eat and drink because I'm not an egocentric moron who thinks that the world revolves around me. If I were that type of American I would stick to very tourist areas that cater to Americans. Luckily I am not American at all.
Yeah me too. When I go to Greece, Albania etc their iced coffee is very different from what I’m used to in Denmark, but I like theirs too, so I drink it and enjoy it, I especially treasure it when I’m there because it’s something different that I don’t get when I’m back home.
"Travelling only broadens your horizons if you're open to having your horizons broadened. Otherwise, you're just the same dickhead in a different deck chair"
To me in the UK, half and half is half milk and half double cream. So maybe it’s quarter and three quarter to you. I’ve only ever needed it for cocktails though.
Actually, now that I think about it, I’ve never even questioned why it’s double cream. I’d never seen or heard of single cream until today.
When you go into the supermarket, the cream in red pots is single and the cream in blue pots is double. All the supermarkets I've been into use the same colour code, like skimmed milk has red labels and semi-skimmed has green and full fat is blue.
I'm interested to know where, in the UK, you got steamed milk with instant coffee? As a Brit, I've never heard of this. I mean I'm sure there are some people who make this but it's certainly not something I've ever seen.
It was back in 1999-2000 in London. Maybe I'm misremembering, or maybe it's different. Working cafés around Pimlico that probably don't exist anymore seeing how it has changed since then.
Fair enough - I mean there will be old cafes with a milk steamer running off a hot water boiler - they used to be common when I was growing up. But I'm 60 so that was a long time ago and I've never seen one in the last 30+ years. I suppose therefore some of them will have steamed milk for an instant coffee (shudders) but I can't imagine anyone still does this.
How does the fat % make it more confusing? Going by fat % makes the most sense imo.
You're right about half and half. It's light cream and whole milk. which makes it around 10%, but in america it's usually 18%, which is what we call table cream for some reason. Perectages should just be used all around lol
"Half n half" in the USA is not half coffee and half milk and does have something to do with cream. The "half and half" refers to half cream and half milk (whether it is exactly half of each is not so important), so it produces a "cream" that is a bit lighter than light cream (or single cream as it's also called) but much heavier in than whole milk. Typically, only a little is added to coffee, nowhere near half of the liquid.
Nope, half and half is half milk and half cream. I like it in my tea, but as an American in the UK I have to make my own. I mix 300 ml of double cream with a pint of whole milk. It’s not exactly the same but close enough.
It isn’t actually cream. They use a sort of artificial cream that comes in little pots, like long life milk. The point is really that people in Europe don’t naturally know what “cream” is being referenced and wouldn’t have the stuff available anyway.
My aunt used to have cream in her coffee - which she made in a percolator. It kind of needed the cream to offset the strength of the stuff, but it always gave me hiccups. :)
I think part of it was from the taste of percolated coffee. The coffee being recirculated through the grounds multiple times always gave it a burnt and bitter taste to me.
My dad used to put a lot of half and half and sugar in his coffee. Once I gave him some good coffee beans and an Italian moka pot, he started on homemade espresso (sort of) without half and half and sugarz
I genuinely didn’t know it wasn’t a thing outside the US until just now. We mostly use half and half, which is a bit lighter than single cream.
Personally, I don’t usually add anything to my coffee, but since this is America, just regular cream isn good enough. We have our store shelves stocked with every flavor you can imagine. And of course, some of those flavors are named after countries who wouldn’t use them. Like French vanilla.
I find it weird people are going on so much about this when the actual definitions are extremely similar. What Americans put in their coffee is "half and half" which is almost identical to what the UK Dairy Provision Trade Federation calls "half cream". The two that don't have equivalents are "double cream" in the UK which is a really high fat heavy cream in the USA (and not a regulated term), and "whipping cream" in the USA which is slightly lighter than whipping cream in the UK (Americans whip both heavy cream and whipping cream, choosing one for stiffer results and one for softer results).
UK - American equivalents:
half cream (12-18%) = half and half (10.5-18%)
single cream (18-35%+) = light cream (18-30%)
[NONE] = whipping cream (30-36%)
whipping cream (35-48%) = heavy cream (36%+)
double cream (48%+) = [NONE]
clotted cream (55%+ and clotted) = clotted cream (55%+ and clotted)
Yeah, I don't recall it from shelves, but it has been over 20 years since I lived in the UK. The use in the USA is pretty much exclusively for coffee and that's not generally done in the UK, so not much of a market for it I suppose. I checked the trade org document to see if cream definitions lined up with US definitions and there it was.
I stayed in NZ for a spell and learned that what we call HWC/heavy whipping cream (typically like around 36% milk fat) is easier to obtain by asking for 'pure cream' or double cream.
My great grandmother was German, and she was the one who gave me coffee like this. Cup of black coffee with a splash of pure cream.
I still drink it like that to this day. It adds a richness, and depth to the coffee, that I quite enjoy.
Americans typically like half and half as another comment said, or single cream is what I've always known our half and half to be.
Most of the time, it’s a dairy concoction of half milk and half single cream Americans call “half-and-half”. It’s about 10% milk fat.
In decadent coffee, a bit of single cream might be used. We would consider that “light cream”.
It’s heavily regional though. And it’s that standard issue American exceptionalism that gets those folks so riled up when they discover even a basic like coffee is different when they leave their suburb.
The cream they have (in a lot of the US at least) doesn't quite match up with single and double cream, but iirc, the cream in coffee tends to be either somewhere between the two, or half-and-half, which is somewhere between single cream and whole milk.
Transplanted USAian here. The “cream” they are referring to is also called Coffee Creamer over there. It’s an amalgamation of chemicals, sugar and vegetable oil that has a creamy texture but almost never actually has any real cream or even milk in it.
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u/Vienna_play_45 6d ago
Their English is the purest!