Cream Cheese
Ingredients
Directions
Make the curd
Pour 5 quarts of milk into a pan.
Add 2 tablespoons of rennet and stir gently.
Let it sit until the curd forms, about 2 hours.
Drain and press
Spread a cheesecloth over a sieve and pour the curd into it to drain the whey.
Break the curd slightly with your hand and transfer it to a vat.
Place a 2-pound weight on top and let it sit for 12 hours.
Dry and ripen
Remove the cheese and wrap it with a cloth.
Turn the cheese daily until dry, covering it with nettles or clean dock leaves.
Place between two plates to ripen for about 3 weeks.
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
What each ingredient does
- Milk
- Forms the body of the cheese, and its proteins set into the curd.
- Rennet
- Enzyme that coagulates the milk into a soft curd for draining.
The step that matters
Let the curd set undisturbed. Rennet needs time to coagulate the milk into a firm curd. Cutting or stirring too early leaves a weak curd that loses fat and protein into the whey and yields a crumbly cheese.
“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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