Skip to main content
Dessert

Guava Cheese

A sweet, lime-flavored guava dessert set in a mold.

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

Why it works: Guava and lime share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 30 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Guava Cheese

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the guavas

  1. Peel, quarter, and wash the guavas in cold water.

  2. Place the guavas in a saucepan and cover with water.

  3. Boil for about 2 hours until tender.

  4. Strain the liquid, reserving it for guava jelly.

  5. Rub the pulp through a fine sieve into a saucepan.

Make the guava cheese

  1. Add lime juice and sugar to the pulp.

  2. Boil until thick enough for a spoon to stand upright in it.

  3. Optionally, add a slight coloring of cochineal.

Set and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a well-buttered mold.

  2. Dry it in the oven.

  3. Turn out onto a dish and serve.

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. Guava + limetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together30 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Guava + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together35 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  4. Guava + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together115 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  5. Lime + sugartop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,332 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

What each ingredient does

Guavas
Provide the pulp and natural pectin that thicken the mixture into a firm, sliceable cheese.
Sugar
Sweetens the paste and, as it cooks down, helps it set firm and keep.
Limes
Add acidity that brightens the flavour and helps balance the sweetness.

The step that matters

Boil until thick enough for a spoon to stand upright in it. Guava pulp must be cooked down far enough to concentrate its sugar and pectin; undercooked paste stays soft and will not set when cooled and dried.

Swap the lime

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (guava, sugar, butter):

  1. Coconutfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Pineapplefits better
  4. Limethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against guava, sugar, butter. 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

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes