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Dutch Cheese

A fresh cheese made by curdling thick milk, sweet milk, and buttermilk, draining, salting, and buttering.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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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 ↓

Dutch Cheese

Ingredients

Directions

Make the curd

  1. Mix the thick milk, sweet milk, and buttermilk in a pot.

  2. Scald the mixture slowly until you can remove the curd with a skimmer without breaking it.

  3. Place a colander over a pail and line it with a linen strainer to catch the cheese.

  4. Dip the curd into the colander and let it drain.

Shape and serve

  1. Season the curd with coarse sea salt to taste and tie it up.

  2. Form the curd into a ball, remove the cloth, and place the cheese on a plate.

  3. Rub the surface of the cheese with butter and slice it for serving.

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).

  2. Buttermilk + buttertop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,674 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Milk + buttermilktop 41% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together9 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Thick milk
Provides the main curd, giving the cheese its body and mass.
Buttermilk
Its acidity helps milk proteins curdle when heated, forming the curd.
Sweet milk
Adds milk solids and moisture, contributing to a softer, creamier curd.
Butter
Rubbed on the surface, it adds richness and a fat coating to the finished cheese.

The step that matters

Scald the mixture slowly until the curd can be lifted with a skimmer. Heating gently lets the curd firm up without tightening too fast and turning grainy or tough. If it breaks apart, the curd will be hard to lift and drain cleanly.

“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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