Why it works: Milk and dock work together. They rank in the top 29% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 18 recipes. Both carry 2-methylbutyraldehyde, which smells malty, chocolate. The science ↓
Cream Cheese
Ingredients
Directions
Make the curd
Pour 5 quarts of strappings into a pan and add 2 tablespoons of rennet.
When the curd forms, gently break it down 2-3 times with a skimming dish.
Let it stand for 2 hours, then place a cheese cloth on a sieve and pour the curd onto it to drain the whey.
Press
Break the curd slightly with your hand and transfer it to a vat, placing a 2-pound weight on top.
Let it sit for 12 hours, then remove and bind a fillet around it.
Ripen
Turn the cheese daily until dry, covering it with nettles or clean dock leaves, and place between two pewter plates to ripen.
If the weather is warm, it will be ready in 3 weeks.
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.
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Milk + docktop 29% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together18 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Strappings
- Provides the milk solids that set into the curd, which becomes the cheese.
- Rennet
- Causes the milk to coagulate into a firm curd that can be drained and shaped.
The step that matters
Breaking the curd gently. Cutting the curd releases whey, and how gently it is broken sets how much moisture stays in the cheese. Breaking it gently keeps the pieces intact and the texture even, while rough handling leaves the curd crumbly and dry.
“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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