Skip to main content
Main

Cheese

A simple cheese made by curdling milk with salt, buttermilk, and lime, then draining, pressing, and aging.

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

Why it works: Coffee and tea work together. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 259 recipes. Both carry 2-methyl-3-(methyldithio)furan, which smells thiamin, meat. The science ↓

Cheese

Ingredients

Directions

Make the curd

  1. Heat the milk in a saucepan over low heat.

  2. Gradually mix in the salt while stirring until nearly boiling.

  3. Remove from heat and pour into a dish to cool.

  4. Add the sour buttermilk and lime juice, then let it sit for 24 hours.

  5. Remove the curd from the whey and place it in a cloth to drain.

  6. Once drained, shake the curds in the cloth to form a mass.

Press and age

  1. Place the curds in a bamboo basket or frame, add a weight with a thin board on top.

  2. The next day, turn the cheese and sprinkle with salt.

  3. After 3-4 days, the cheese is ready to eat, but it improves with longer storage.

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. Coffee + teatop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together259 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methyl-3-(methyldithio)furan (thiamin, meat).

  2. Milk + coffeetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,202 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  3. Milk + teatop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together738 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  4. Tea + limetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together48 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Buttermilk + limetop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together62 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

New milk
Provides the protein and fat that form the curd.
Sour buttermilk
Adds acidity and cultures that help the milk thicken and separate into curds and whey.
Lime juice
Adds acid that helps the milk proteins coagulate into curds.

The step that matters

Shake the curds into a mass in the cloth. Curds must be drained and gathered while still soft and moist so they bind together. If they are handled too roughly or left to dry, they crumble instead of forming a cohesive cheese.

Swap the lime

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, coffee, tea, buttermilk):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Peachfits better
  3. Grapefits better
  4. Limethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, coffee, tea, buttermilk. 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.

You might also like

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