Skip to main content
Main

Potato Cheese

A cheese made by boiling potatoes, mixing with milk, rennet, spices, and allowing it to set and drain.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Caraway and cumin share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Potato Cheese

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the potatoes

  1. Boil the potatoes until soft, keeping the skin intact.

  2. Peel the potatoes and mash them into a smooth paste.

Make the cheese

  1. In a bowl, combine the potato paste, milk, rennet, salt, caraway, and cumin.

  2. Knead the mixture well and cover it.

  3. Let it sit for 3-4 days in winter or 2-3 days in summer.

  4. Knead again and place the mixture into wicker molds.

  5. Allow the cheeses to drain until dry and firm.

  6. Store in a warm place to harden gradually.

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. Caraway + cumintop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together81 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Potato + cumintop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together972 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  3. Potato + milktop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  4. Potato + carawaytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together115 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-decenal (green, must).

  5. Milk + carawaytop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together647 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

Potatoes
Form the bulk of the paste and give the cheese its body and moisture.
Milk
Adds moisture and richness, helping the paste become a soft, cohesive curd.
Rennet
Enzyme that coagulates the milk proteins so the mixture sets into a curd.

The step that matters

Letting the mixture sit for the full resting time. Resting allows the rennet to coagulate the milk and the mixture to acidify and develop flavour. Cutting it short leaves the cheese soft and underdeveloped, while the season changes how quickly this happens.

Swap the caraway

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (potato, milk, cumin):

  1. Turmericfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Corianderfits better
  4. Carawaythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against potato, milk, cumin. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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 potato cheese recipes

Cakes 13 See all 10 →

You might also like

Potato CroquettesPotato Croquettes255 recipesPotato RollsPotato Rolls78 recipesPotato ChipsPotato Chips53 recipesSweet Potato CroquettesSweet Potato Croquettes53 recipes