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Drink

Whey

A liquid byproduct of curdled milk, made by dissolving a junket tablet in water, adding to milk, warming, curdling, and straining.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Whey

Why it works: Junket and milk work together. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 103 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Whey

Ingredients

Directions

Make the curd

  1. Dissolve the junket tablet in cold water.

  2. Add the mixture to the fresh milk.

  3. Warm gently until slightly above blood heat.

  4. When the curd is solid, beat it well with a fork.

  5. Keep warm until the curds shrink considerably.

Separate the whey

  1. Strain off the whey and set it on ice.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Junket + milktop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together103 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Junket tablet
Contains rennet, which sets the milk into a solid curd by coagulating its proteins.
Fresh milk
Supplies the proteins and fat that form the curd, and the liquid that separates into whey.

The step that matters

Warm gently until slightly above blood heat. Rennet works best at a gentle warmth; heating too much can weaken or prevent the set, while cold milk may not coagulate properly.

“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.

More whey recipes

Wine 118White Wine 44Lemon 26Rennet 18Mustard 11Cream of Tartar 7 See all 15 →

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