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New Jersey Cream Cheese

A homemade cheese made by curdling milk with rennet, draining, salting, and ripening with sweet grass.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and grass work together. They rank in the top 27% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9 recipes. Both carry 2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

New Jersey Cream Cheese

Ingredients

Directions

Set the curd

  1. Scald the desired quantity of milk.

  2. Let the milk cool slightly.

  3. Add the rennet according to package instructions.

  4. Once curd forms, gently remove it with a ladle without breaking it.

Drain and press

  1. Place the curd on a thin cloth held by two people.

  2. Sprinkle a ladleful of water over the curd to separate.

  3. Hang the cloth to drain the water.

  4. Press the curd lightly for one hour.

  5. Cut the curd into small pieces using a thread.

  6. Place a cloth between each piece.

  7. Press the curd for another hour.

Salt and rest

  1. Rub the curd with fine salt.

  2. Let the curd sit on a board for an hour.

  3. Wash the curd in cold water.

  4. Allow the curd to drain.

Ripen

  1. In a day or two, the skin will dry.

  2. Place sweet grass under the cheese.

  3. Place sweet grass over the cheese to aid ripening.

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. Milk + grasstop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together9 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

What each ingredient does

Milk
Forms the body of the cheese; its proteins set into curd when coagulated.
Prepared rennet
Causes the milk to coagulate into a firm curd that can be cut and drained.

The step that matters

Once curd forms, gently remove it with a ladle without breaking it.. Breaking the forming curd releases fat and whey unevenly, which leaves a drier, crumblier cheese with a less even texture.

“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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