Today at the grocery store I found myself staring into the dairy case with bewilderment.  I needed half and half for a recipe I planned to make.  But the dairy gods wanted me to choose: between half and half and  FAT FREE half and half.

In what kind of world does the phrase "fat free half and half" even make sense?  Not mine, surely, so I bought the regular half and half.  It was a fear-based dairy purchase.  Once I got home, I did some research on "fat free half and half."  

As it happens, my understanding of "half and half" is entirely correct.  According to the US Food and Drug Administration, "Half-and-half is the food consisting of a mixture of milk and cream which contains not less than 10.5 percent but less than 18 percent milkfat. It is pasteurized or ultra-pasteurized, and may be homogenized."

Legally, companies are allowed to use the "half and half" name, because they are clearly labeling it as "fat free."  Chemically, fat free half and half is skim milk with a ton of thickeners to provide that creamy weight and texture which buyers expect from half and half.  Corn syrup and carrageenan, mostly.

Can you use it?  Well, that depends.  Obviously a lot of people are, or it wouldn't be on the shelves.  If you want a guiltless treat for your morning coffee, then fat free half and half will do the trick.  Fat free half and half can also be substituted for any instance where regular half and half is only there to provide consistency.  However, the taste of fat free half and half is quite different from regular half and half, so be prepared to be able to tell the difference between them.

For example, fat free half and half is an excellent choice for making non-acidic soups such as potato soup.  It gives the soup the right consistency and volume of liquid, without adding all the fat.  (Regular half and half has almost 30 grams of fat per cup.)  Ideally you would want to use it in a strongly flavored soup, to help blur the unusual taste of the fat free half and half.  

What you don't want to do is substitute fat free half and half in recipes where the fat content is the reason for including half and half in the first place.  Ice cream, for example, is not the place to experiment.  There are plenty of specifically fat free ice cream recipes (most of them add more egg yolks, as a stabilizer to help balance out the lack of fat).  

Recipes with high acidity, such as tomato soup, also do not perform well with fat free half and half as a substitute.  The high acidity naturally curdles the milk, which is a problem that the extra cream in half and half helps to prevent.  I ran across a lot of mentions of acidic recipes having curdled fat free half and half, and isn't that a shame!

Regular half and half has almost 30 grams of fat per cup, and if you use it very often, then switching to the fat free version might not be a bad idea.  Just be careful not to use it in anything acidic, and be prepared for unusual results if you're cooking "off the map."