Skip to main content
Main

Sour Milk Cheese or Cottage Cheese

A simple cheese made by curdling sour milk, draining, mixing with salt, butter, and cream, then forming into balls.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Sour Milk Cheese or Cottage Cheese

Ingredients

Directions

Make the curd

  1. Heat the sour milk slowly until the curd separates from the whey.

  2. Strain through cheesecloth and squeeze the curd until dry.

Finish and shape

  1. In a bowl, mix the curd with salt, butter, and cream using a spoon or fork.

  2. Form the mixture into balls, optionally rolling them in chopped parsley.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Milk + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,399 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

What each ingredient does

Sour milk
Its acidity causes the milk proteins to coagulate into curds separated from the whey.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a softer, smoother mouthfeel to the curd.
Cream
Adds moisture and fat, loosening the curd into a creamier texture.

The step that matters

Squeezing the curd until dry. Excess whey left in the curd makes the cheese watery and loose. Pressing out the liquid gives a firmer, more cohesive texture before the butter and cream are mixed in.

“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 cottage cheese recipes

Salad 11Pie 10Sandwich 8Cake 7Wine 5Balls 3 See all 76 →

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes