Cheese, Quark

⚠ UNTESTED — I have not made quark. Written as a briefing rather than a report.

Quark is the everyday fresh cheese of Germany and most of central Europe, and it occupies a position English-speaking kitchens simply do not have a word for. It is not cottage cheese, because it is drained smooth rather than rinsed and left in curds. It is not cream cheese, because there is no cream in it. It is not yogurt, because it is set with a whisper of rennet and drained. It is its own thing, eaten on bread at breakfast, folded into cheesecake, and stirred with herbs into Kräuterquark for potatoes.

The make could hardly be simpler: culture the milk at room temperature, add one drop of rennet, wait a day, drain. What separates it from the French fromage blanc made almost identically is mostly the drain and the vocabulary — which is a thing this collection keeps finding, and the cheese section has a whole argument about it.

The diagnostic detail: it is drained, not rinsed. A cottage cheese is washed to stop the acid and dressed with cream. A quark is hung in a cloth until it is thick, and its acid is its flavour.

Ingredients

• 1 gallon whole or skim milk (not ultra-pasteurised)
• 1/8 tsp mesophilic culture, OR 1/2 cup fresh cultured buttermilk
• 1 drop liquid rennet, single strength, diluted in 1/4 cup cool unchlorinated water
• 1/4 tsp calcium chloride solution, if the milk is shop-bought
• 1/2 tsp fine salt, or none — quark is traditionally unsalted
• Optional, for a richer quark: 2-4 Tbsp heavy cream stirred in at the end

Directions

Key ingredients

Salt · Buttermilk

1. Warm the milk to 72 °F / 22 °C. Room temperature, no more. Skim milk gives the traditional lean quark; whole milk gives a softer, richer one. Both are correct and the German trade actually classifies them by fat content.
2. Culture it and stir it right through. Sprinkle, wait a minute, stir top to bottom.
3. One drop of rennet, diluted. Same principle as every cultured fresh cheese: the rennet is not making the cheese, it is making the set strong enough to survive being hung in a bag. Use cool unchlorinated water for the dilution.
4. Cover and leave it 18 to 24 hours at room temperature. Longer than a fromage blanc, which is most of why quark tastes sharper. You want a firm set with clear whey standing on top and a clean break when you tip the pot.
5. Ladle it into butter muslin and drain 6 to 12 hours. Do not pour — pouring the whole pot shatters the curd and sends fines through the cloth. Drain in the fridge if you want to stop the sourness where it is, at room temperature if you want it sharper.
6. Beat it smooth. Quark should be smooth and slightly glossy, not curdy. A minute with a spoon or a few seconds with a stick blender. If you want it richer, this is where the cream goes in — not at the start, where it would just drain away.
7. Keep it cold and eat it within a week.

Notes

Where this recipe came from — and what it isn’t 🔴 UNTESTED. Standard home method, consistent across the German-language and English sources. The one thing I would watch on a first run is the set time: 18-24 hours is a long room-temperature ferment and a warm kitchen will get there considerably sooner.

Quark, fromage blanc, twaróg, tvorog — one make, several vocabularies ⭐ This is worth stating plainly because it is the cheese section’s whole argument in miniature. Quark (Germany), fromage blanc (France), twaróg (Poland), tvorog (Russia) and farmer cheese (the US) are the same make with different drain times, different fat levels and different national names. There is no chemical boundary between them. What separates them is habit — which is exactly what the world tour found for the rest of cheesemaking too.

The name Quark is simply the old German word for curd, cognate with Slavic tvarog. ⚠ It has nothing to do with the subatomic particle in the direction people assume: Murray Gell-Mann took the word from a line in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (“Three quarks for Muster Mark”), and has said he had the sound in mind before he found the spelling. Whether Joyce in turn had the cheese in mind is not settled.

How Germany classifies it By fat in dry matter — Fett i. Tr. — which is a fairer measure than fat in the wet cheese, because a wetter cheese looks leaner than it is. Magerquark is the skim version and is a staple of German sports nutrition for the same reason.

Variations Kräuterquark: herbs, salt, a little oil, eaten with boiled potatoes. Baking: German cheesecake (Käsekuchen) is made with quark, not cream cheese, and the two are not interchangeable — quark is leaner and more acid, so a cream-cheese cheesecake recipe made with quark will be firmer and sharper.

Read alongside /cheese/makes/fresh-and-acid-set/ on the site.