Why Cream Should Just Be Cream
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What we use, why we use it, and where we're still working to get better.
We mentioned this briefly in last week's pasta story, but it's worth its own space. Cream is one of the most-used ingredients in our kitchen, and it's also one of the easiest places for a "clean" dish to quietly stop being clean.
What "Just Cream" Actually Means
Most cream on grocery shelves has more than one ingredient. Thickeners and stabilizers like carrageenan get added to keep it from separating. It gets homogenized—forced through tiny nozzles under pressure so the fat never rises to the top the way cream naturally does. And a lot of it is ultra-pasteurized (UHT): heated to around 275°F for a couple of seconds so it can sit on a shelf for months instead of weeks.
Each of those steps solves a shelf-life or shipping problem. None of them make the cream better—they just make it more convenient to sell at scale. We'd rather use cream that's just cream, even if that means restocking more often.
What We Actually Use
Our first choice is Family Thyme Cream, a local A2 dairy brand we source from. It's non-homogenized and never ultra-pasteurized—the ingredient list is just cream, full stop.
When we can't get enough of it, we source Kalona SuperNatural grass-fed cream instead. It holds to the same standard—low-temp pasteurized, non-homogenized, one ingredient, from small family farms. It's not our local pick, but it doesn't ask us to compromise on how it's made.
Where We're Not Where We Want To Be
Here's the honest part. Right now, some of our dairy still comes to us in plastic. That matters more with cream than with a lot of other ingredients—research on food packaging has consistently found that fat-soluble compounds from plastic migrate more readily into higher-fat foods like dairy, meat, and oils than into leaner ones. It's not a reason to panic, but it's not nothing either.
Getting all of our dairy into glass is something we're actively working toward. It's not there yet, and we're not going to pretend it is. With your support, that's one of the first things we want to fix as Hoosier One grows.
A Personal Note From Lee
I'm still on my own health journey, and I'm not a picture of perfect health—I don't think anyone really is. But as I've gotten older and tried to find some balance in how I eat, one of the biggest things I've come back to is family and community. For a while, I was eating alone, foods I didn't even really enjoy, because I thought that's what I was supposed to eat. Eventually I started asking a different question: what's the point of any of this if I can't sit down and eat with the people I love?
That's part of what sent me down the path of actually looking at ingredients instead of just categories. Cream and dairy are a good example. There's some genuinely interesting research here—a long-running Harvard cohort found that men who ate ice cream regularly had a lower risk of type 2 diabetes than men who rarely did, a result that actually surprised the researchers who found it. Separately, studies out of Toronto and elsewhere have found that kids who drink whole milk tend to have lower BMIs than kids who drink skim. Nobody fully understands why yet, and these are observational studies, not proof of cause and effect—but it's hard to ignore that dairy fat doesn't behave the way a lot of us assumed it would.
I'm not saying everyone should eat dairy, and I'm not saying dairy is healthy for everyone. If you struggle with it, cutting it out is often the right call, and plenty of people genuinely feel better without it. What I am saying is: maybe, again, it was never the food itself. When I look at what homogenization, ultra-pasteurization, and thickeners actually do, I wonder if dairy's gotten a bad rap for reasons that have less to do with dairy and more to do with what we started doing to it.
For me, this was about finding the highest-quality dairy I could, so I could enjoy the meals that make life worth showing up for—a really good chicken alfredo, creamy mashed potatoes at a table with people I love. That's the whole point of Hoosier One, really.