Sour Cream

Note Profile

Prepared

About

Sour cream is dairy cream fermented with lactic acid bacteria until it thickens and tartens. It smells of two things at once: a soft buttery dairy fat and a clean acid tang. Neither half dominates the other by much. It is milkier than yoghurt and looser than cream cheese.

Scent Profile

lactonic and sour are the note, and the balance between them is the point. The one sensory definition both sources build on, Meunier-Goddik 2004 quoted in the Journal of Dairy Science paper, gives it as 'a delicate lactic acid taste with a balanced, pleasant, buttery-like (diacetyl) aroma'. The 32-sample study corroborates each half separately: lactic acid is 'the prominent organic acid in all sour creams', 'sour taste was the predominant sensory attribute', and the diacetyl flavour tracks measured 2,3-butanedione at r =. lactonic is placed a little ahead of sour because the buttery half is reported as aroma and the acid half as taste, and this is a smell vocabulary. nutty is the only other facet anyone states outright, from Britannica's 'fatty, slightly nutty flavor of sour cream'. Below that nothing is stated: clean_musk, sweet_vanillic, aldehydic for the octanal and acetaldehyde named among the high-impact volatiles, animalic and sulphurous for the fermentation. Those are placed low with wide spreads rather than at zero, because no source denies them either.

ScentWheel

Breadthmedium

EnvelopeHeart · ~5h lasting

Family Sweet & Gourmand, Fruity

Read off the wheel, not a label applied to the note.

Origin

Cream cultured with lactic acid bacteria. Britannica puts its consistency 'between that of heavy cream and that of cream cheese'. The tang is lactic acid produced by the bacteria, with smaller amounts of acetic, formic, propionic and pyruvic acid. The buttery half is diacetyl, measured as 2,3-butanedione in a 32-sample study in the Journal of Dairy Science.

Usage in Perfumery

A gourmand dairy note. It is not a fragrance material sold by any supplier under this name. Perfumers reach it by pairing a lactonic butter or milk accord with an acid facet, and the result reads as the savoury end of the dairy family rather than the dessert end.