Originally Posted by M60_to_LGA

Hi -

First world problem, I know, but I figured someone here might know the answer.

There's an Israeli woman who has a Youtube cooking channel that I watch, and she had a great recipe for baked pasta with spinach in a cheesy tomato cream sauce, which I want to make this week. The recipe calls for שמנת לבישול , which translates as "cooking cream." I have never heard of that term in English, and I'm trying to figure out what product might be equivalent to that in the US.

From doing a Google search on the Hebrew and looking at the pictures, it seems that in Israel this cream has something like 15-18% fat. In the US, all I've ever seen is whipping cream, which appears to have around twice that fat content. I'm thinking that would be too heavy, given the dish will already be pretty cheese-intensive. Is there a better kind of cream to use? Unfortunately, when looking at products on supermarket websites here, none of them seem to give the percentage of fat content.

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide!

Originally Posted by M60_to_LGA

Thanks to all for the replies!

Isn't half and half only used for coffee, though? I've never heard of that being used in cooking - but maybe I'm wrong.

I'll have to try Stop & Shop this weekend. My other local NYC supermarkets are pretty questionable in the dairy department; when I've tried to find simpler things like buttermilk they only have maybe one variety. S&S seems to have something called "light cream," but I don't know if that's lighter than half and half or not - they don't give a fat content. Sigh.

In the worst case, I guess I can just test out a small amount of whipping cream and dilute with milk if it's too heavy... first-world problem, as I said.