Cheese, Pultost

⚠ UNTESTED. A briefing.

A Norwegian sour-milk cheese — soft, spreadable, sharp, and traditionally scented with caraway. Also called knaost or ramost, and, when the caraway goes in, kummenost.

🔴 And the interesting thing is what the caraway is FOR. In this cheese the salt and the caraway are added to STOP the fermentation — they are the brake, not the seasoning. The flavour everybody knows it by is a side effect of the off switch.

⭐ That is the sharpest version of something this collection keeps meeting: smoke was preservation, mint was an antimicrobial, sage was medicine — the taste is the residue of a job. Here the job is simply stop.

⚠ No rennet at all, and made from skimmed milk — historically the cheese you made after the cream had gone to butter.

Ingredients

• 2 gallons skimmed milk — skimmed while still warm, traditionally
• 1/2 cup cultured buttermilk or soured milk, as the starter
• 1 to 2 Tbsp salt
• 1 to 2 Tbsp caraway seed — the traditional flavouring, and the stop signal

Directions

Key ingredients

Salt · Buttermilk

1. Sour the skimmed milk. Stir in the buttermilk and leave it warm until it has clabbered firmly and smells sharp — a day is usual. ⭐ Acid coagulation only; no rennet goes anywhere near this cheese.
2. 🔴 Heat it slowly to somewhere between 113 and 149 F / 45 and 65 C. ⚠ The range is real, not vagueness on my part — different valleys and different makers use different temperatures, and it is one of the ways one pultost differs from another. Start around 130 F / 55 C.
3. Hold it an hour off the heat, and let the curd gather.
4. Ladle the curd into cloths, and let it drain a full two days.
5. 🔴 Now crumble it and let it ferment at room temperature. This is the step that makes it pultost rather than a plain sour curd: the crumbled cheese is left to work, and it gets sharper and softer and more pungent as it does. Taste it daily.
6. ⭐ When it tastes right, STOP it — with salt and caraway. Work them both through thoroughly. ⚠ This is a decision, not a step: whenever you add them is what your pultost will taste like, and there is no going back or forward from there.
7. Pack it into a tub, and keep it cold from then on.
8. What right looks like: soft enough to spread, grainy rather than smooth, sharp and quite pungent, with the caraway sitting over the top of it.

Notes

Where this recipe came from — and what it is not 🔴 UNTESTED. Traditional pultost is made from milk skimmed immediately after milking, while still warm, and started with a house culture of old lactic strains rather than a packet — neither of which a domestic kitchen reproduces exactly.

⭐ The seasoning as an off switch It is easy to read “salt and caraway are added” as a flavouring step. In the traditional descriptions they are what arrests the fermentation — which means the maker is choosing the finished flavour by choosing when to intervene, and the caraway is the timestamp. ⭐ A cheese whose defining flavouring exists to end the process is a very unusual object, and I have not met another in this collection.

⚠ Not to be confused with its neighbour Gamalost is the other famous Norwegian sour-milk cheese, and it is nearly the opposite: no salt at all, and ripened with a mould (Mucor mucedo) that is worked into the surface so the cheese matures from the outside in. ⭐ Pultost stops itself with salt; gamalost hands itself over to a fungus. Same starting material, opposite philosophies.

⚠ And this is the second cheese in this batch that sits outside its spine. Pultost has no shaping and no surface-area strategy at all — it is included because it completes the Nordic sour-milk picture that brunost and the whey cheeses only half tell.

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