Skip to main content
Drink

Whey

Whey is a liquid by-product of curdled milk made by adding rennet or pepsine wine to warm milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
Jump to recipe ↓
Whey

Why it works: Milk and wine are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,116 recipes. Both carry sotolon, which smells fenugreek, curry. The science ↓

Whey

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 100°F (38°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the curd

  1. Warm 1 pint of milk slowly to 100°F (38°C).

  2. Add 1 square inch of rennet or 1½ teaspoons of pepsine wine.

  3. Allow it to stand for about 30 minutes.

Strain

  1. Strain it through a muslin bag.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + winetop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (fenugreek, curry).

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 the rennet or pepsin sets into curd, with whey draining away.
Rennet or pepsine wine
Enzyme that causes the milk proteins to coagulate and separate into curd and whey.

The step that matters

Warming the milk slowly to 100°F (38°C). Enzymes work within a limited temperature range. Heating too fast or too far can weaken or destroy the enzyme, so the milk may not set properly.

“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 whey recipes

You might also like