Skip to main content
Main

Cheese Making

A method for making cheese using butter, milk, rennet, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Cheese Making

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rennet

  1. Clean the calf stomach with salt and let it drain for a few hours.

  2. Sew the stomach with salt or stretch it on a salted stick.

Make the curd

  1. Warm part of the milk until it is the heat of new milk.

  2. Add enough rennet to turn the milk and cover it.

  3. Let it stand until completely turned, then strike it down with a skimming dish.

  4. Gently gather the curd to the side of the tub, letting the whey pass through your fingers.

  5. Place the vat over the tub and press the curd into it, leaving two inches above the edge.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

What each ingredient does

Calf stomach
Supplies rennet, the enzyme that causes the milk to set into curd.
Fresh-made butter
Adds fat, richness and flavour to the finished cheese.
Skimmed milk
Provides the protein and casein that set into the curd.
New milk
Supplies the fat and casein that form a firmer, richer curd.

The step that matters

Adding the rennet. Too little rennet leaves the milk unset, while too much can make the curd bitter and rubbery. The milk should be at the right warmth, because rennet works best at body temperature and slows when cold.

“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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes