Cheese, Cream (Cultured)

This is one of the soft cheeses I actually make. It is also the one where the homemade version is most obviously a different product from the tub, and I want to be straight about the direction of that difference: mine is softer, tangier and it weeps. That is not a fault I have failed to fix. It is what cream cheese is without gums in it.

Cream cheese is a cultured acid-set cheese: a milk-and-cream blend, a mesophilic culture, a whisper of rennet to firm the set, overnight at room temperature, then drained in a bag. No cooking, no press, nothing to age. The diagnostic detail that separates it from every other fresh cheese on this page is the cream — the US standard of identity requires at least 33% milkfat, which is why a quark or a fromage blanc made the same way tastes lean beside it.

The commercial block contains stabilising gums — locust bean, guar, carrageenan — and is hot-packed, which is what gives it that dense, sliceable, never-weeping body. You are not going to reproduce that at home and you should not try. What you get instead is a spreadable cheese that tastes of cultured cream, which the block does not.

🔴 And the name is wrong. Cream cheese is from New York, not Philadelphia — see the notes.

Ingredients

• 1 quart whole milk (not ultra-pasteurised)
• 1 quart heavy cream
• 1/8 tsp mesophilic culture (MM100, MA4001 or equivalent) OR 4 Tbsp fresh cultured buttermilk
• 1 drop liquid rennet, single strength, diluted in 1/4 cup cool unchlorinated water
• 1 to 1 1/2 tsp fine salt, to taste
• Optional: 1/4 tsp calcium chloride solution, if the milk is shop-bought

Directions

Key ingredients

Salt · Buttermilk

1. Warm the blend to 72 °F / 22 °C — and no further. This whole make happens at room temperature. In most kitchens most of the year you can hit it by leaving the pot on the counter for an hour. Do not pasteurise it yourself on the way up: heating cream above about 165 °F denatures the whey proteins onto the casein and gives you a grainy set.
2. Culture it. Sprinkle the powder over the surface, leave it one minute to rehydrate, then stir it through thoroughly — top to bottom, not a swirl. If you are using buttermilk instead, it must be live cultured buttermilk; the acidified stuff sold as buttermilk substitute contains no organisms and will do nothing.
3. Add one drop of rennet — yes, one. Diluted in cool unchlorinated water, stirred in for about thirty seconds. This is not a rennet cheese. The dose is there so the set holds together in the draining bag instead of running through it as soup. Chlorinated tap water deactivates rennet, which is the commonest reason a set never firms.
4. Cover it and walk away for 12 to 16 hours. You are waiting for a set that pulls cleanly from the side of the pot when you tip it, with a little clear whey pooling on top. In a cold kitchen this takes longer; go by the set, not the clock.
5. Drain in butter muslin, 6 to 12 hours. Ladle — do not pour — into a cloth-lined colander, tie the corners and hang it. Where you hang it is the one real decision left. At room temperature it drains faster and keeps acidifying, so it finishes tangier; in the fridge it drains slower and the flavour stops where it is. I do it in the fridge and accept the extra hours.
6. Salt, then beat it. Scrape the curd into a bowl, add the salt, and beat it hard with a spoon or a hand mixer for a minute. Beating is what makes it smooth — an unbeaten drained curd is grainy and reads as a failure when it is only unfinished.
7. Eat it within about ten days. No rind, high moisture, nothing preserving it but cold.

Notes

Where this recipe came from — and what it isn’t This is the standard home method, and it is one of the few on this page I have actually made. It is not a reproduction of the supermarket block and cannot be: that product contains stabilising gums and is hot-packed. Judge this against cultured cream, not against Philadelphia.

The name is a marketing decision, and the cheese is from New York Cream cheese as we know it is credited to William Lawrence of Chester, New York, in 1872, who was trying to copy the French Neufchâtel and overshot on the cream. The Philadelphia brand name came later and was chosen because Philadelphia was then a byword for good food — it is a quality association, not a place of origin. So the most famous American cheese is named after a city it has nothing to do with, which is a pattern this collection keeps running into.

The number that defines it The US standard of identity (21 CFR 133.133) requires at least 33% milkfat and no more than 55% moisture. That is the whole legal difference between cream cheese and the leaner fresh cheeses made by an identical method — Neufchâtel in the US is the same make at a lower fat content. ⚠ Note this is the American Neufchâtel; the French cheese of that name is a bloomy-rind cheese and a completely different thing.

Why yours weeps and theirs doesn’t Whey continues to separate from a high-moisture curd for days. The commercial product stops it with hydrocolloids — locust bean gum, guar, carrageenan — which bind free water. You have none, so you will get a little whey in the tub. Pour it off, or stir it back in for a looser spread. If it bothers you, drain it two hours longer rather than reaching for a gum.

Variations Neufchâtel-style: replace the cream with whole milk for a leaner, tangier cheese. Herb and garlic: fold dried herbs in at the salting stage — fresh garlic in a cheese you will keep more than a few days is a hazard rather than a flavour. Whipped: beat in 2 Tbsp of cream after salting.

Sourcing and gear Butter muslin, not cheesecloth — the weave on supermarket cheesecloth is far too open for a curd this fine and you will lose a noticeable part of the yield through it. Cultures keep for roughly two years in a sealed packet in the freezer; the enemy is moisture, not warmth.

Read alongside The full walkthrough for this family, including why the cultured route and the hot-acid route produce genuinely different materials, is at /cheese/makes/fresh-and-acid-set/ on the site.