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Fresh Cheese

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Buttermilk and cream work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 674 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Fresh Cheese

Ingredients

Directions

Make the curd

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

  2. Gradually stir in the salt until the milk is nearly boiling.

  3. Remove from heat and let it cool in a dish.

  4. Add the 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 salt

  1. Place the curds in a bamboo basket or frame, and add a weight of about 6 pounds with a thin board in between.

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

  3. It will be ready to eat in 3 to 4 days, but tastes better if kept longer.

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. Buttermilk + creamtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together674 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Milk + cheesetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,426 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Cream + cheesetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Milk + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,399 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  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
Forms the body of the cheese, and its proteins set into the curd.
Sour buttermilk
Its acidity and cultures start the milk thickening into curds.
Lime juice
Adds acid that helps the milk separate into curds and whey.
White salt
Seasons the cheese and slows unwanted bacterial activity in the milk.

The step that matters

Heating the salted milk to nearly boiling. Stirring salt in gradually and stopping near boiling keeps the milk from scorching on the bottom of the pan. Overheating can make the proteins grainy and weaken the curd that forms later.

Swap the lime

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Limethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, buttermilk, cream, cheese. 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.

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