Skip to main content
Dessert

Curd Cheese

Curd cheese is made by curdling warm milk with lemon or lime juice, draining the whey, and shaping the curds.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Milk and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,053 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Curd Cheese

Ingredients

Directions

Make the curd

  1. Warm the milk over a gentle fire.

  2. Add the lemon or lime juice to the warm milk.

  3. When curds form, pour through a sieve lined with muslin cheese-cloth.

Drain and serve

  1. Hang the curds to drain until all the whey is out.

  2. Press into any desired shape and serve.

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 + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Milk
Provides the proteins that coagulate into the curds, forming the body of the cheese.
Lemon or lime juice
Its acidity causes the milk proteins to curdle and separate from the whey.

The step that matters

Warm the milk gently. Heating over a gentle fire, rather than boiling, keeps the milk from scorching and lets the acid form soft, tender curds. Overheating can make the curds tough and grainy.

“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 curd cheese recipes

Cake 7Cakes 3 See all 3 →

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes