Homemade Coffee Creamer: Three Recipes, and What Is in the Bottled Kind

The easiest homemade coffee creamer is vanilla sweet cream: equal parts heavy cream and whole milk, sweetened with vanilla syrup, shaken in a jar and kept in the fridge. Mix 120 ml of cream, 120 ml of milk and about three tablespoons of vanilla syrup, and use a tablespoon or two per cup.

Homemade creamer is cheaper than the bottled kind, contains only what you put in it, and can be made as sweet or as plain as you like. Whether it is healthier depends entirely on the recipe — which is easier to see once you know what is in both.

What is in bottled creamer

Powdered creamer whitens coffee without fresh milk. Coffee-mate, introduced by Carnation in February 1961, is the best-known example, and its Original powder is mostly three ingredients: corn syrup solids, hydrogenated vegetable oil and sodium caseinate. It also contains small amounts of dipotassium phosphate to prevent it coagulating in hot coffee, mono- and diglycerides as emulsifiers, an anti-caking agent, flavouring and colour.

Two things in that list surprise people.

"Non-dairy" creamer can contain milk. Sodium caseinate is made from casein, the main protein in milk. US labelling rules allow a creamer that contains it to be called "nondairy", provided the caseinate is followed in the ingredient list by a note identifying its source, such as "a milk derivative". People avoiding dairy for allergy reasons need to read the label rather than the front of the pack.

The oils have changed. Creamers once relied on partially hydrogenated oils, the main source of artificial trans fat. The FDA concluded in 2015 that these oils were no longer "generally recognised as safe", and for most uses manufacturers could not add them to foods after 18 June 2018, with a final deadline of 1 January 2021 for products already in distribution.

Liquid flavoured creamers are mostly sugar, water and oil. The USDA's entry for a flavoured liquid cream substitute lists 251 kcal, 33 g of sugar and 13.5 g of fat per 100 g — about 38 kcal and 5 g of sugar per tablespoon.

Three homemade creamers

Vanilla sweet cream. Shake the cream, milk and syrup together in a jar. It is the closest to the "sweet cream" that coffee chains pour into cold brew, and it whitens coffee richly with very little sugar. Use homemade vanilla syrup, or two tablespoons of maple syrup with a teaspoon of vanilla extract.

Condensed milk creamer. Whisk a standard can of sweetened condensed milk with 360 ml of milk and two teaspoons of vanilla until smooth. This is the base most copycat recipes use, because it tastes like the bottled kind — thick, sweet and caramel-tinged. It is also the easiest to flavour: whisk in cinnamon, a few drops of hazelnut or almond extract, or cocoa mixed to a paste with a little hot water.

Dairy-free. Blend a barista-style oat milk or canned coconut milk with maple syrup and vanilla. Barista versions are worth the extra cost here because they contain an acidity regulator, the same dipotassium phosphate found in Coffee-mate, which helps them resist curdling in hot coffee — the plant milk guide explains why plant milks curdle and how to prevent it.

The arithmetic of sweetness

The figures in the table come from the USDA's composition data, and they show why "homemade" and "healthier" are not the same thing.

• Vanilla sweet cream: 120 g of heavy cream, 120 g of milk and 45 g of syrup come to about 285 g, holding roughly 32 g of sugar and 47 g of fat. Per tablespoon, that is about 1.7 g of sugar and 2.5 g of fat.
• Condensed milk creamer: a 397 g can of condensed milk is about 54% sugar, so with the milk the whole batch of about 757 g holds roughly 233 g of sugar. Per tablespoon, that is about 4.6 g — nearly as much as a bottled flavoured creamer.
• Plain half-and-half, for comparison, is about 20 kcal and under 1 g of sugar per tablespoon, all of it milk sugar.

So if the aim is less sugar, sweet cream wins and condensed milk does not. If the aim is less fat, condensed milk creamer is lighter. And if you mainly want your coffee whiter and creamier, half-and-half on its own does the job with the fewest additions.

Storage

Homemade creamer has none of the preservatives or long-life processing of the bottled kind, so treat it like the dairy it is made from:

• Keep it in the fridge in a clean, sealed jar.
• Use it within the shelf life of its ingredients — before the earliest use-by date of the milk or cream you used.
• Shake before every use. Fat from the cream rises as the jar stands, just as it does on unhomogenised milk; separation is normal, not spoilage.
• Throw it out if it smells sour or thickens.

Dairy creamers rarely curdle in ordinary coffee. In a test published by the coffee magazine BeanScene, dairy milk stayed smooth until coffee was very acidic, around pH 4.1 cold and 4.5 hot; most coffee is less acidic than that. If a dairy creamer does curdle, it has usually started to sour.

For other ways to flavour coffee, see the coffee syrups guide and the pumpkin spice latte recipe.