The Surprising Truth About Common Half-and-Half Substitutes, According to Our Culinary Director (It's Not Half Milk and Half Heavy Cream)

My family members are dairy fiends. At any point in time, our fridge will be stocked with milk, heavy cream, labne, and at least five different kinds of cheese (but usually more). The one dairy product we never seem to have when we need it is half-and-half. We like to use it in recipes like quiche and mashed potatoes, where we want an ingredient that’s richer than milk but lighter than cream, but those recipes aren’t ones we make often, and so we don’t usually keep half-and-half on hand.

For those times when a recipe calls for half-and-half and you don’t have it, I wanted to know which substitutions work best. I spoke with Stephen Chavez, senior chef-instructor at the Institute of Culinary Education’s Los Angeles campus, as well as our Editorial Director Daniel Gritzer, to learn more about how to substitute the dairy product.

What is Half-and-Half, and When Is It Used?

Half-and-half is a mixture of cream and whole milk and is required by the Food and Drug Administration to contain between 10.5 to 18% milk fat. As a result, it’s thicker than milk but thinner than heavy cream. While the name half-and-half implies an equal-parts mixture of milk and cream, that's not necessarily the case: The legal requirements for half-and-half come down to fat percentages, not specific ratios of milk to cream, though as you can probably guess, equal parts milk and cream can get you in the ballpark.

“Half-and-half can be used in recipes where extra fat is needed beyond the fat content that is found in regular milk,” says Chavez, “but not the high-fat content of heavy cream. The combination works great for lighter custards such as flan or the egg custard mixture you would use for bread pudding. Half-and-half is also great for the texture of quiche, French toast, and budino,” a rich Italian pudding. Chavez notes that heavy cream is preferred when you’re looking to achieve an even richer texture in desserts like crème brûlée.

The Best Substitutes for Half-and-Half

Since half-and-half is legally defined by its fat percentage and not by volumes of milk and cream, there are many ways to arrive at the goal. Here are some guidelines for substituting half-and-half by mixing milk at different fat percentages (from whole to skim) and heavy cream. Note: If you're using a lower-fat cream like light cream, you will need to increase the amount of cream relative to the milk (closer to the basic 1:1 ratio by volume that half-and-half's name suggests).

• Whole milk and heavy cream: From a practical standpoint, an equal-parts mixture of whole milk and heavy cream in place of the exact amount of half-and-half a recipe calls for will generally work, but technically you'll end up making a mixture that has a higher fat content than any half-and-half sold in markets.
  
  That's because whole milk is 3.25% fat and heavy cream is at least 36% fat. If you make an equal-parts mixture of those two, you will get a product that is at least 19.625% fat, which is 1.625% higher than the maximum amount of fat in half-and-half as defined by the FDA.
  
  Will that 1.625% difference really matter in a recipe? Probably not, but if you're a fastidious person who wants to actually reproduce half-and-half faithfully at home, you're better off using a roughly 2:1 ratio of whole milk to cream, meaning for every 1 part milk you will add 1/2 part cream. This will land you properly in the FDA’s half-and-half fat zone (3/4 part cream also works too for a richer result that's still within FDA guidelines).
  
  
• Low-fat or skim milk and heavy cream: Blending low-fat or skim milk with heavy cream works just as well as whole milk, and technically you can use the exact same ratio as whole milk for any of these lower-fat options and still get a result that's within the FDA's required half-and-half fat range of 10.5-18%. But, because these milks have slightly less fat than whole milk, the result will be on the low end of that range.
  
  By just slightly adjusting the ratio with more cream, you can nudge your mixture into the middle of the FDA's fat range, which is arguably a nice thing to do given fat is delicious; a ratio of 3/4 parts cream for every 1 part low-fat or skim milk works well. 

Common Half-and-Half Substitutes That Don't Work

The following are common suggestions for half-and-half substitutes, but they’re not recommended by Chavez or Serious Eats’ culinary team. 

• Whole milk and melted butter: “Butter is made by separating the fat from cream,” says Daniel. “Milk and cream are emulsions with the fat suspended in water with proteins and sugars in the mix. When you make butter, the fat coalesces by churning the cream, breaking the emulsion. If you then melt the butter and try to mix it with milk, you won't get half-and-half, you'll just get milk with liquid butterfat floating on the surface, and that will not generally perform the same as something like half-and-half, where the fat is still in an emulsified state.” 
  
  Because of this, we can’t rely on butter to reintroduce fat into milk and form a proper half-and-half mixture.
  
  
• Buttermilk: While buttermilk might have a similar viscosity to half-and-half, it’s actually much leaner, containing around 1% fat compared to the 10.5 to 18% in half-and-half. It's also a cultured dairy product with an acidic tang—it's the culturing, in fact, that gives buttermilk its viscosity, similar to how milk thickens into yogurt.
  
  “The acidity of buttermilk makes it a poor substitute for half-and-half for flavor reasons alone,” says Daniel. “The low pH of buttermilk, which is around 4.4 to 4.8, means it can make batters and other mixtures behave very differently. On top of that, while they may share similar viscosities, the reasons for that are different, with buttermilk getting it from coagulated proteins due to changes in acidity and half-and-half getting it from fat. As a result, they won't work the same way in all situations.”
  
  
• Milk and cornstarch: “This combination must be boiled in order for it to thicken, which means that you would have to cook it in a pot before using it in a recipe,” Chavez says. “The starch will thicken when cooking but will give you more of a starchy, pudding-like texture rather than the smooth silky texture half-and-half would give you.” Daniel echoes Chavez’s hesitation about this substitute. “A starch-thickened milk may behave differently in recipes than something like half-and-half,” he says. “You may be able to create a similar viscosity using a starch, but the fat content is different and that can make a difference in the final cooking results. It's not a safe substitute.”
  

Can You Freeze Half-and-Half?

While you may be tempted to freeze half-and-half to guarantee you always have it on hand, Chavez doesn’t recommend it. “Ingredients with a high water content will freeze well, but it is the defrosting process where things go wrong,” he says. Once you defrost any dairy product, the fat can separate and the product often takes on a grainy texture. In some cases, this may not have a noticeable impact on your final recipe, but in others, it will. 

The Takeaway

If the next time you’re stuck in the middle of a recipe and looking for a half-and-half substitute, there are a few options that will work. You can use a combination of whole, low-fat, or skim milk and heavy cream in roughly 2:1 proportions of milk to cream by volume (not half and half, as the label implies!).