Why it works: Whey and spirit work together. They rank in the top 28% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓
To Make Rennet
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the stomach
Remove any crude food or straws from the calf's stomach, but leave the curdled milk.
Add a handful of coarse sea salt to the stomach.
Sew and roll up the stomach, then place it in a jar and cover with another handful of coarse sea salt.
Cover the jar and let it sit for ten days.
After ten days, drain and wipe the stomach, then cover it with a thin cloth to dry near the kitchen fire.
Make the steep
For larger quantities, cut a whole dry maw into pieces, add a handful of salt, and pour 6 to 9 pints of cooled boiling whey over it.
Strain the steep after a few weeks and bottle it, optionally adding a glass of spirits to each bottle.
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.
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Whey + spirittop 28% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together4 recipes
Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Stomach of a new-killed calf
- Supplies the natural enzymes that curdle milk, the active agent of this rennet.
- Coarse sea salt
- Draws moisture out of the stomach and preserves it during the ten-day salting.
- Boiling whey
- Acts as the liquid that extracts the enzymes from the dried stomach into the steep.
The step that matters
Pouring the whey over the maw. The whey must be cooled after boiling before it is poured over the maw. Enzymes are proteins, and very hot liquid can denature them, weakening the rennet.
“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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