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Pot Cheese

Pot Cheese is a simple cheese made by heating clabbered sour milk, separating whey, draining curd, adding salt, cream, butter, and forming balls.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

Pot Cheese

Ingredients

Directions

Make the curd

  1. Heat a pan of clabbered sour milk over the fire until the whey separates.

  2. Strain the mixture through a cloth and squeeze the curd dry.

Season and shape

  1. Add a little coarse sea salt, 2-3 tablespoons of cream, and a little butter.

  2. Mould the mixture into balls.

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. Cream + buttertop 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

Clabbered sour milk
Its curds form the body of the cheese once the whey separates.
Cream
Adds moisture and richness, softening the dry curd.
Butter
Adds fat, giving the cheese a richer flavour and smoother texture.

The step that matters

Squeezing the curd dry. Excess whey left in the curd makes the cheese wet and loose, so it will not hold its shape when moulded. Straining through a cloth and pressing removes that liquid before the cream and butter are added.

“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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