Tag: cheatsheet-dairy
-
Kermaviili | Cultured Sour Cream

Kermaviili is a cultured cream product sitting quietly at the center of Finnish home cooking without getting nearly enough credit for it. Nobody has ever been nervous about kermaviili. It’s the approachable member of the viili family.
-
Piimä | Cultured Buttermilk

Piimä is a fermented milk drink — tangy, pourable, and thinner than yogurt. If you’ve had buttermilk in the US, you’ve had its distant American cousin. They’re not wrong, exactly. But they’re not entirely right, either.
-
Kuohukerma | Whipping Cream (Pasteurized)

Finland’s pasteurized heavy cream — the one that handles heat. Kermojen aatelia, the nobility of creams.
-
Vispikerma | Whipping Cream

Vispikerma is Finland’s shelf-stable whipping cream — 38% fat, UHT-treated, designed for cold applications where the cream needs to hold its shape. Its pasteurized counterpart kuohukerma handles heat better. Finnish bakers know the rule: vispikerma on display, kuohukerma hidden inside.
-
Maitojuoma | Milk Drink

Maitojuoma — literally “milk drink” — is a legal category that covers lactose-free milk, protein-reduced budget milk, and plant-based alternatives. Most of the time it’s lactose-free. For cooking, it’s interchangeable with regular milk. But the story of how Finland solved lactose intolerance while the rest of the world was still treating it as an inconvenience?…
-
Ruokakerma | Cooking Cream

Ruokakerma is the workhorse cream of the Finnish kitchen — a starch-stabilized cooking cream (10–22% fat) that won’t curdle no matter how long you simmer it. Thinner than heavy cream, trickier than half-and-half, it sits in a gap American dairy doesn’t bother to fill. Here’s what it actually is, what it’s made of, and why…