Cheese, Mysost

⚠ UNTESTED. A briefing.

🔴 This is not a cheese, and the recipe is going to keep saying so. There is no coagulation anywhere in it. Nothing is curdled, nothing is drained, nothing is pressed. You boil whey until the water is gone.

Mysost means, literally, whey cheese — and the process has far more in common with boiling sap into maple syrup than with anything else on this site: a dilute solution reduced by evaporation until what was dissolved in it becomes the product.

⭐ What you are concentrating is mostly lactose, which is why the result is sweet, and milk protein, which is why it browns. It sets firm on cooling because sugar at that concentration does, not because anything set.

⚠ This is the lean, original farm version — no cream. For the fatter, softer, far more famous one, see Cheese, Brunost (Gjetost), which is this recipe plus one idea.

Ingredients

• 1 gallon fresh sweet whey — the more the better; this reduces enormously

A heavy-bottomed pan, wider than feels necessary

• A silicone spatula that reaches the corners of the pan

Directions

Key ingredients

Salt

1. Strain the whey through fine cloth first. Any curd fines will scorch and you will taste it in the finished block.
2. ⭐ If you want a second-run cheese as well, take it FIRST. Heat the whey to 195 F, skim the raft off for Cheese, Anari, and then reduce what is left. You cannot do it the other way round, and doing both is the traditional order.
3. Boil it down, uncovered, over moderate heat. For the first two or three hours this needs very little from you beyond an occasional stir and a wide pan.
4. 🔴 The last twenty minutes is the whole job. As it thickens to the consistency of a caramel sauce it will catch and burn very quickly. Lower the heat, stir constantly, and do not leave it. ⚠ Whey has far less fat than milk to protect the bottom of the pan.
5. Take it off when it is the colour of caramel, NOT the colour of coffee. ⭐ It darkens a little more off the heat, so stop slightly earlier than looks right.
6. ⚠ Optionally beat it smooth as it cools. Traditional practice, and it does a real job: beating breaks up the lactose crystals that would otherwise make the finished block gritty. If your brown cheese comes out sandy, this is the step you skipped.
7. Press it into a mould or a lined tin while still warm, and let it set firm. Wrap it closely; the cut face dries and hardens.
8. What right looks like: firm, sliceable, fudge-brown, sweet with a savoury edge, and smooth rather than grainy on the tongue.

Notes

Where this recipe came from — and what it is not 🔴 UNTESTED, and 🔴 it is not a cheese by any definition this section uses. It is delicious and it is an ingenious use of a waste stream, and it is a reduction. The Scandinavia page makes the fuller argument.

🔴 A correction to this section’s own page, and it matters at the pan The makes page says the lactose caramelises, and that is not quite right. The browning of heated milk products is predominantly a Maillard reaction — reducing sugars (lactose, and the glucose and galactose it breaks into) reacting with amino groups from the milk proteins to form the brown polymers called melanoidins. True caramelisation of lactose happens too, and it is the smaller contributor.

⭐ Why that is not pedantry: Maillard needs the PROTEIN as well as the sugar. It is the reason a whey with more protein left in it browns better and tastes deeper, the reason adding milk or cream intensifies the colour rather than merely diluting it, and the reason you cannot simulate this by boiling down a sugar syrup. The protein is not a passenger; it is half the reaction.

⚠ It is also why this is easy to ruin Maillard browning accelerates sharply as water leaves, so the reaction runs fastest exactly when the pan is thickest and least forgiving. The last twenty minutes is not a stirring chore, it is the entire flavour of the product being made and then, if you look away, destroyed.

⭐ On the name, which is a system rather than a taxonomy Mysost is whey cheese. Fløtemysost is cream whey cheese. Geitost (or gjetost) is goat cheese. Brunost is simply brown cheese. 🔴 None of those names describes a method, because the method does not change — they describe what went in, or what colour came out. Somebody choosing between “gjetost” and “brunost” in a shop is choosing between an animal and a colour, not between two products.

Read alongside /cheese/makes/whey-and-second-run/ on the site.