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Cheese Making

A method for making cheese by curdling milk with rennet, draining, and salting.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Cheese Making

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the milk

  1. Skim the cream from the milk and set it aside.

  2. Warm the milk over low heat until it reaches blood temperature.

  3. Stir in the cream until no particles float on the surface.

  4. Strain the milk into a cheese tub.

Set and cut the curd

  1. Add a large tablespoon of rennet.

  2. Cover the tub with a cloth.

  3. Let it sit undisturbed for 40 minutes until it coagulates.

  4. Cut the curd.

  5. Cover the tub again.

  6. Let it sit overnight.

Drain and finish

  1. In the morning, drain the curd.

  2. Strain the morning's milk into the same tub.

  3. Add rennet.

  4. Repeat the process.

  5. Once drained, combine the two curds.

  6. Scald.

  7. Salt to taste.

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

What each ingredient does

Milk
Forms the body of the cheese as its proteins coagulate into curd.
Rennet
Enzyme that clots the milk into a firm curd for cheese.

The step that matters

Let it sit undisturbed for 40 minutes until it coagulates. Moving the milk while it sets breaks the forming curd into fragments, so it cannot knit into a firm mass and loses whey poorly, leaving a weak, crumbly cheese.

“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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