Cheese, Brunost (Gjetost)

⚠ UNTESTED. A briefing.

⭐⭐ This is mysost plus one idea, and the idea has a date, a place and a name attached to it.

Boiled-down whey had been a lean, sugary Norwegian farm staple for generations. In 1863, at the Valseter mountain farm near Gålå, a dairymaid named Anne Hov added cream to the whey before boiling it down, and reduced it much further than was usual. What came out was firmer, fattier and far more like a cheese — and it turned a peasant thrift food into an export industry.

⭐ She called it feitost — “fat cheese” — which is the whole invention recorded in the name. It was later renamed fløtemysost, “cream whey cheese”. When she added goat’s milk as well, the result became Gudbrandsdalsost, which is the brown cheese most people outside Norway have actually eaten.

⚠ It is still not a cheese. Nothing is coagulated. But it is a much better thing than what it improved on, and that is a fair claim to make for one addition.

Ingredients

• 1 gallon fresh sweet whey — goat whey for a true geitost, cow for fløtemysost
• 1 to 2 cups heavy cream — this is the whole point of the recipe
• 1 cup whole goat’s milk, optional, for the Gudbrandsdalsost style
• A heavy-bottomed pan, wider than feels necessary

Directions

Key ingredients

Salt

1. Strain the whey through fine cloth, and take a second-run cheese off it first if you want one — see Cheese, Anari. Reduce what is left.
2. Boil the whey down, uncovered, until it has reduced by roughly two thirds. Two to three hours, wanting little attention.
3. 🔴 Now add the cream — and add it LATE, not at the start. Stir in the cream (and the goat milk, if you are making the Gudbrandsdalsost style) once the whey is already well reduced. ⚠ Adding it at the beginning means holding dairy fat over direct heat for three hours, which does the flavour no favours and scorches sooner.
4. Reduce hard, stirring more and more constantly. Anne Hov’s version went down to less than a fifth of its starting volume — far further than the lean farm version — and that is what makes it firm and cuttable rather than sticky.
5. 🔴 The last twenty minutes decides everything. Constant stirring, lowest workable heat, and reach the corners of the pan. Caramel-coloured, not coffee-coloured — it darkens further off the heat.
6. ⚠ Beat it smooth as it cools, which breaks up lactose crystals. This is the difference between a smooth brown cheese and a sandy one.
7. Press into a lined mould while warm and let it set, then wrap it closely.
8. What right looks like: firm enough to shave with a cheese slicer, fudge-like rather than crumbly, sweet and caramelly with a distinctly savoury, faintly goaty edge if you used goat whey.

Notes

Where this recipe came from — and what it is not 🔴 UNTESTED. 🔴 And it is not a cheese — no coagulation, no curd, no draining. See Cheese, Mysost for the argument and for the Maillard correction, which applies here with more force because there is more protein in the pan.

⭐ Anne Hov, and why the story is worth keeping straight She was working at Valseter, near Gålå in Gudbrandsdalen, and the change she made in 1863 was simply to put cream in and reduce further. ⭐ In 1933, aged 87, she was awarded the King’s Medal of Merit for what it did for Norwegian food and for the district’s economy — which is an unusually well-documented ending for a story about a dairymaid and a pot.

🔴 The names, sorted out once Brunost = brown cheese, the umbrella term. Mysost = whey cheese, the lean original. Fløtemysost = cream whey cheese, Anne Hov’s cow-milk version. Geitost / gjetost = goat cheese, made with goat whey or goat milk. Gudbrandsdalsost = the blend of cow and goat with cream, named for the valley, and the most popular of the lot.

⚠ So “gjetost” and “brunost” are not two varieties, and asking which is better is like asking whether you prefer wholemeal or brown. See Cheese, Mizithra for the Greek half of the same habit — four names there, five here, and not one of them describes a technique.

⭐ The tool was invented for it The ostehøvel, the Norwegian cheese plane you see brown cheese served with, is not an old folk implement — it was patented on 27 February 1925 by Thor Bjørklund, a carpenter in Lillehammer, who got the idea from the woodworking plane (høvel) on his own bench and wanted a way to cut cheese thinly and without waste. ⭐ A cheese that is not a cheese, eaten with a tool that is a woodworking plane — and both of them turned into Norwegian export industries.

⚠ A note on scale, because this one is genuinely tedious A gallon of whey gives a few ounces of finished brunost after three to five hours at the stove, most of the last hour spent stirring. It is worth doing once to understand it, and after that most people quite reasonably buy it. That is not a criticism of the recipe; it is the honest ratio of effort to output, and better said than discovered.

Read alongside /cheese/makes/whey-and-second-run/ and the Scandinavia page.