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Junket

Junket is a fresh cheese made by curdling milk with rennet and sugar, then draining the whey.

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

Why it works: Milk and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 77,875 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Junket

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Heat the milk to about 100°F (38°C).

  2. Dissolve the sugar in the warm milk.

  3. Stir in the dissolved rennet.

  4. Let it stand until curdled, which will take a few minutes.

  5. Break up the curd with a fork and strain off the liquid (whey).

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. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Milk
Provides the protein and liquid that rennet coagulates into a soft, delicate curd.
Rennet tablet
Enzyme that clots the milk proteins into a set curd without cooking or heavy stirring.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to the mild, pale curd.

The step that matters

Heat the milk to about 100°F (38°C) before adding the rennet. Rennet works best at body-warm temperatures. If the milk is much hotter, the enzyme can be weakened or destroyed, and the milk may fail to set. If it is cold, setting is slow and weak.

“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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