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Dessert

Pot Cheese

Pot cheese is a cold cheese made by curdling soured milk, draining, mixing with thick cream and salt, then forming into a mound or balls.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,399 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Pot Cheese

Ingredients

Directions

Make the curd

  1. Heat soured milk in a pan until scalding hot.

  2. Ladle curd and whey into a muslin bag and hang to drain for 1–2 hours.

Season and shape

  1. Remove curd from the bag and moisten with thick cream.

  2. Mix in salt and work with your hands.

  3. Form into a mound in a glass dish or roll into balls.

Store and serve

  1. Cover and keep in a cool place, serve cold.

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 + 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

Soured milk
Its acidity curdles the milk, separating solid curd from liquid whey.
Thick cream
Adds fat and moisture, making the curd softer and richer.
Coarse sea salt
Seasons the curd and adds a savoury flavour.

The step that matters

Heat soured milk until scalding hot. Heat helps the acidified milk coagulate into firm curd. If it is not hot enough, the curd stays weak and drains poorly, so the cheese comes out soft and loose.

“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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