At least four hours before you plan to use it, mix the sour cream with the other ingredients. You can double this recipe. Mix in a bowl, then replace the lime crema into the container the sour cream came in for easy storage.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast! I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make lime crema. In the process, we’ll learn how to zest and juice citrus fruit, in this case lime, and how to peel and mince garlic.

Lime crema is really easy to make but don’t substitute anything or leave any ingredients out. I am not a huge fan of sour cream or garlic, but I love lime so I gave this recipe a try. Now I’m obsessed with eating lime crema on everything. It’s delicious! I make it with a 16 oz tub of sour cream, double the salt to ½ tsp, but use just one clove of garlic, peeled and minced very fine. You can double the garlic too if you like. I zest one entire lime and use as much juice from the lime as I can get and that’s enough.

You’ll need a small mixing bowl for this one, or a medium mixing bowl if you’re using a 16 oz carton of sour cream. Take all the sour cream out of the carton and put it in the bowl. Add the salt and mix it in with a spoon. Then you’re going to need to zest your lime.

Zesting a citrus fruit is easy. It’s one of those things where it’s easier if you have the right tool, but if you don’t have the right tool it’s still not too hard, you just have to be a little extra careful. The right tool is a microplane or microzester. I got one for Christmas a few years ago and I love it. It makes zesting citrus so easy!

The zest is the peel of a citrus fruit, but only the part of the peel that has color. The layer underneath the color is white and has a bitter flavor. Ideally you want to get the color off but not any of the white part, which is called the pith. This is easy with a microplane, but if you don’t have one, you can use the small holes in a cheese grater. I have the kind of cheese grater that’s just a piece of metal with sharp holes poked through it. You rub the lime over the sharp points and it grates off the surface. You have to be careful not to grate one place too long or you’ll go through into the pith. The easiest way to use a cheese grater to zest citrus is to set the grater over the mixing bowl, hold it in place with your off hand, and rub the fruit over the small points. The zest will fall directly into the bowl.

This sounds way more complicated than it is, trust me. And there’s nothing that makes me feel more gourmet than adding zest to a recipe. Plus, it adds a ton of flavor and little specks of color.

Juicing a lime is easy even if you don’t have any kind of juicer. Just stick a fork into the lime after you’ve zested it, push the fork tines around inside the lime to break open the little juicy bits, and squeeze the juice into the bowl. Watch out for seeds. You can get a lot of juice out of even a small lime this way, just keep sticking the fork into it and breaking up the membranes that contain juice.

Make sure you zest the lime before you juice it. If you juice it first, it loses its shape and is much harder to zest.

Next, you need to peel and mince a garlic clove.

A head of garlic looks like a little white paper purse full of marbles. You may have seen it at the store and thought WHOOEEE that is expensive and I don’t know what to do with it. It’s only expensive because it’s probably marked as so much per pound, but pick up one of those pieces. It weighs almost nothing. So it’s not that expensive. Don’t be intimidated. You can handle the garlic.

Peel some of the papery outer parts off the garlic and you’ll start to see that the marbles are little teardrop shaped p

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