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To Make Good One-meal Cheese

A cheese made from fresh milk, rennet, optional flour and salt, curdled and drained in a cheese basket.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

To Make Good One-meal Cheese

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the milk

  1. Strain the new milk into a well-cleaned cheese tub.

  2. If the milk is too cool, heat a portion in a clean vessel until warm and mix the warmed portion back into the tub.

Set the curd

  1. Soak the rennet in water and tie the rennet in a cloth bag.

  2. Add half a teacupful of rennet to the milk and stir the milk.

  3. Wait 20 to 30 minutes for the curd to form.

Cut and drain

  1. Cut the curd with a wooden knife until the whey rises clear.

  2. Break the curd lightly and let the curd sit for a few more minutes.

  3. Transfer the curd to a cheese basket to drain.

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 + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

New milk
Forms the body of the cheese and is turned into curd by the rennet.
Rennet
Enzyme that coagulates the milk proteins so they set into a curd.

The step that matters

Cut the curd until the whey rises clear. Cutting releases whey from the curd; cutting too early or too little leaves the curd soft and wet, while cutting until the whey runs clear gives a firmer curd that drains 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.

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