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Pepsin Butter

Butter made by adding pepsin and sodium sulphate to milk and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Pepsin Butter

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Warm the milk and salt mixture to blood heat.

  2. Add the pepsin and sodium sulphate.

  3. Agitate or churn the mixture until it thickens.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Milk
Forms the base that thickens and sets into a curd-like mass.
Pepsin
An enzyme that clots milk protein, causing the mixture to thicken.

The step that matters

Agitate or churn the mixture until it thickens.. Agitation gathers the fat globules and clotted protein into a mass and separates them from the liquid. Stopping too early leaves the mixture loose, while churning too long can make it grainy.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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