You can keep butter in your fridge for weeks and it will stay fresh enough to use. (If you’re fussy you can scrape off a thin layer of slightly-oxidized butter from the surface.) You can’t do that with cream. That doesn’t matter so much if you have shops where you can conveniently buy fresh cream every week, which is pretty common these days but maybe used not to be.
As others have said, cream contains a lot more water than butter does. If you spread whipped cream on your toast, I’m pretty sure you’ll get soggy toast.
Butter keeps approximately its consistency for much longer than whipped cream does. If you make sandwiches with whipped cream and take them to work or school for lunch, I’m pretty sure you’ll end up with not-at-all-whipped cream making your sandwiches soggy.
If you’re specifically buying fancy butter, you may want the flavour of fancy butter. This is not the same as the flavour of whipped cream. (Just how different depends on exactly what sort of fancy butter.)
It’s not so easy (I think) to whip up cream in very small quantities. That “serving” looks to me like a distinctly larger amount of cream-or-butter than I’d want in contexts where I’m using butter but not cooking with it.
Generally, I’m not very sure why you would use whipped cream instead of butter. I mean, OK, it’s a bit cheaper (if you ignore wastage and effort and so forth), but so are many other things: water, flour, sawdust. And while clearly whipped cream is more like butter than water, flour and sawdust are, I don’t see that it’s so much like butter as to serve the same purposes. It doesn’t have the same taste, the same consistency, the same balance of nutrients, the same anything.
Tastiness (for me) isn’t a scalar thing. You want different tastes in different contexts. (In some sense chocolate is far tastier than butter, but there are many purposes for which I would use butter and would not consider using chocolate. The same is true of bacon. I’m not sure there’s any purpose for which chocolate and bacon are both suitable replacements for butter.)
Fair. (Apart from the bit about having them simultaneously.) I didn’t think of that because I wouldn’t generally eat toast with nothing on it but butter.
You can keep butter in your fridge for weeks and it will stay fresh enough to use. (If you’re fussy you can scrape off a thin layer of slightly-oxidized butter from the surface.) You can’t do that with cream.
Yes, you absolutely can do this with cream. Cream doesn’t go bad for quite some time—it can easily keep for 2 or 3 weeks, even longer. (In fact, I have never seen cream go bad—though I haven’t deliberately tested it, the point is that your cream accidentally going bad is very unlikely.)
Hmm, interesting. When I buy cream (from a supermarket; I guess they are very cautious) the date they put on it is generally about one week in the future. I’ve taken their word for it and bought it not too long before I need to use it. I should do some experiments...
I’m in the UK. Dairy products here are commonly pasteurized, but to me UHT means something much more extreme which spoils the flavour and I certainly wouldn’t expect cream to be UHT-ed. Is cream really UHT by default in the US? Ewww.
UHT for cream isn’t as bad as it is for milk, and it can be done more or less well, but typically all the cream at grocery store, including the organic stuff, will be UHT: https://www.peapod.com/product-search/heavy whipping cream
You can keep butter in your fridge for weeks and it will stay fresh enough to use. (If you’re fussy you can scrape off a thin layer of slightly-oxidized butter from the surface.) You can’t do that with cream. That doesn’t matter so much if you have shops where you can conveniently buy fresh cream every week, which is pretty common these days but maybe used not to be.
As others have said, cream contains a lot more water than butter does. If you spread whipped cream on your toast, I’m pretty sure you’ll get soggy toast.
Butter keeps approximately its consistency for much longer than whipped cream does. If you make sandwiches with whipped cream and take them to work or school for lunch, I’m pretty sure you’ll end up with not-at-all-whipped cream making your sandwiches soggy.
If you’re specifically buying fancy butter, you may want the flavour of fancy butter. This is not the same as the flavour of whipped cream. (Just how different depends on exactly what sort of fancy butter.)
It’s not so easy (I think) to whip up cream in very small quantities. That “serving” looks to me like a distinctly larger amount of cream-or-butter than I’d want in contexts where I’m using butter but not cooking with it.
Generally, I’m not very sure why you would use whipped cream instead of butter. I mean, OK, it’s a bit cheaper (if you ignore wastage and effort and so forth), but so are many other things: water, flour, sawdust. And while clearly whipped cream is more like butter than water, flour and sawdust are, I don’t see that it’s so much like butter as to serve the same purposes. It doesn’t have the same taste, the same consistency, the same balance of nutrients, the same anything.
This post is based on my (apparently not universal!) understanding that whipped cream is far tastier than butter.
Tastiness (for me) isn’t a scalar thing. You want different tastes in different contexts. (In some sense chocolate is far tastier than butter, but there are many purposes for which I would use butter and would not consider using chocolate. The same is true of bacon. I’m not sure there’s any purpose for which chocolate and bacon are both suitable replacements for butter.)
Both would be tasty on toast. Even simultaneously!
Fair. (Apart from the bit about having them simultaneously.) I didn’t think of that because I wouldn’t generally eat toast with nothing on it but butter.
Yes, you absolutely can do this with cream. Cream doesn’t go bad for quite some time—it can easily keep for 2 or 3 weeks, even longer. (In fact, I have never seen cream go bad—though I haven’t deliberately tested it, the point is that your cream accidentally going bad is very unlikely.)
Hmm, interesting. When I buy cream (from a supermarket; I guess they are very cautious) the date they put on it is generally about one week in the future. I’ve taken their word for it and bought it not too long before I need to use it. I should do some experiments...
Where are you? In the US cream is generally UHT pasteurized, but if you’re somewhere where that’s not common your cream won’t last as long.
I’m in the UK. Dairy products here are commonly pasteurized, but to me UHT means something much more extreme which spoils the flavour and I certainly wouldn’t expect cream to be UHT-ed. Is cream really UHT by default in the US? Ewww.
UHT for cream isn’t as bad as it is for milk, and it can be done more or less well, but typically all the cream at grocery store, including the organic stuff, will be UHT: https://www.peapod.com/product-search/heavy whipping cream