Norwegian Brunost Cheesecake
A caramelised whey cheesecake as complex as an Ibsen play, as expressive in colour as a Munch painting.
It burned, the brown cheese, for five full days under the mountain.
Nothing had ever been seen like it, they said.
"I didn't know that brown cheese burns so well," one mumbled in shock.
Another, with professorial detachment, simply remarked that the high concentration of fat and sugar means it burns "almost like petrol if it gets hot enough".
It was early 2013. A truck driver escorting 27 tonnes of that distinctly Norwegian brown cheese called brunost (or gjetost if it is a goat’s milk variety) noticed smoke billowing rudely from his trailer. The Brattli Tunnel he was driving through in northern Norway is over 2 miles long. And, with smoke quickly turning to flame and 300 metres ahead of him until daylight, what more could he do other than stop, jump out the vehicle, and run for his life.
The heat and fumes were so intense in that deep, mountain tunnel that nothing could venture through it again for weeks.
Three years later, in a central Stockholm kitchen run by a man with a Vincent Price moustache (or 21st Century Bob Dylan moustache if you’re so inclined), I, Wil Reidie, was introduced to brunost for the first time.
Though used much like a cheese at many Norwegian breakfast tables, technically it isn’t one at all. To make it, the whey left from genuine cheese-making is blended with milk and cream and reduced down until such little water remains that the sugars caramelise and proteins start to brown (aka the Maillard reaction if you’re into that kinda thing1).
What we end up with is a tender “cheese” with the consistency of a young gouda from the fridge, though rather more like play-doh at room temperature, and a golden brown colour hinting at its rich caramel and lightly roasted flavour.
Despite being up to 30% sugar, it is not, surprisingly, all that sweet. The sugar in the product is lactose, which has a fraction of the sweetness of sugars such as sucrose or fructose. The flavour of brunost is unique because of this. It has a base aroma of caramel and dulce de leche and toffee, though with comparatively little of the sweetness, and a distinct savoury/umami edge that leans so heavily into the buttery that it borders on meaty.
This weird play between the sweet and deeply umami reminds me of miso (the flavour of which also has much to thank browning/Maillard reactions for).
Longtime readers of my little corner of the internet will know I love using miso to add complexity to sweet dishes, and I think this Norwegian brunost does a similar job really well.
Which brings me back to Stockholm…
The dish my moustachioed head chef tasked me with making back in that Stockholm kitchen a decade ago was a simple ice cream of brunost (or mesost as we called it in Sweden, which translates to “whey cheese”) that his grandmother used to make.
I’ve wanted to share a recipe that makes use of brunost in a similar way since I picked up a few packs when I was back in Stockholm earlier this year (it’s so expensive and much harder to find here in Finland). And, much as I love the ice cream flavoured with it, there was really only one thing I wanted to use my limited supply of the stuff on…
… Cheesecake.
And, specifically, a cheesecake cooked in that hard and fast Burnt Basque style2 with a deeply caramelised topping and a centre set as convincingly as a badly told lie.
What we end up with is a cheesecake that gestures to the salted caramel world, but with both a much more integrated and subtle saltiness and a caramel that is far more complex. Because of this, it is lovely eaten leisurely with a cup of strong coffee at the end of a meal so you can really savour the interesting flavours going on.
My journey toward a brunost cheesecake
My jive here at The Recovering Line Cook is to share recipes I’ve been making for years, be it from my restaurant life or those I’ve long cooked in my little Finnish kitchen. The benefit of this is I don’t tend to need to do much in the way of testing, I just share what I know and love.
This time it wasn’t so straightforward.
For as long as I’ve been making Basque cheesecake, I’ve done so according to the entirely reliable recipe shared by Nigella Lawson. So I started by simply swapping out a portion of the cream cheese for brunost.
Though the flavour was great doing this, it was clear that brunost behaves differently to regular cream cheese, and testing was required.
Following a few versions (my freezer is now half full of cheesecake), what I have today for you is a recipe quite diverged from where I started, but one I’m delighted with. I’ve also been sure to list fat contents of all relevant dairy. I often find this missing in recipes but I think it important as the balance of fat and protein and water impacts how sensitive the cake is to overcooking.3
A Recipe for Norwegian Brunost Cheesecake
Ingredients
400g cream cheese
200g brunost
200ml cream (38% fat)
100g creme fraiche (28% fat)
225g sugar
3 eggs
20g corn starch
Optional: 1 teaspoon of white miso (see note below)
Method
Start by getting all your ingredients at room temperature to make them easier to blend. Grate your brunost and warm your cream in a saucepan gently. It doesn’t need to get very hot/scalding, something like 70/80°C will do, just hot enough to melt the brunost. Take the cream off the heat, add the grated brunost and stir to combine. It should come together perfectly smooth with no splitting. If needed to fully melt the brunost, put the pan back on the heat. The important thing is to not let it get too hot or the risk of splitting increases. Once it’s all together and smooth, set it aside to cool to room temp.
Gently beat your cream cheese in a large bowl, followed by the creme fraiche. Stir your corn flour in with your sugar (this helps stop lumps forming) and then beat this gently into your cream cheese/creme fraiche. Then fold in your brunost cream and, finally, beat in your eggs one by one.
A 6 inch/ 20 cm round pan is a good size for this quantity. Scrunch up a piece of baking paper and line the pan with it, don’t worry about folds. Then pour in the batter.
I then let this rest in the fridge for a good 30 minutes (more on this below).
At this point, heat your oven to 240°C/460°F. I have only had success making Basque cheesecakes using conventional oven settings, NO FAN. Fan cooking just seems too efficient in my experience, even having adjusted to a lower temperature. It heats the cake too aggressively and gets the centre overcooked before the top “burns” in that beautiful way we want. This may be an idiosyncrasy of ovens I’ve used, but the above temperature in a conventional oven works really well for me.
Put your cake in the middle of your hot oven.
Now for timings:
For a very soft, pudding/creme brulee-like centre, cook for about 25 minutes
For something firmer, but still creamy, edge toward 30
Any longer and you risk overcooking as the oven is so hot.
Once very dark on top, and still looking worryingly liquid, take the cheesecake from the oven and let it cool on a wire rack. The cake will continue to cook from residual heat and, trust me, it’s much better undercooked than over.
After a few hours, a hint of warmth from the oven remaining, it will still be dramatically molten in an authentically Spanish style4 (particularly so if cooked 25 minutes). A few further hours/overnight in the fridge will give you a dense but yielding exterior and an infinitely creamy middle that just holds its shape. This is how I like it best.
(Update: I just tasted this a few days on from the final test and I think the flavour might even be better after a day or so in the fridge. Any food scientists feel free to educate me on why this might be so…)
I am blessed with exceptionally safe eggs here in Finland, but if this is any concern to you, be sure to take it to at least 60°C and use a temperature probe in the centre.
Otherwise, the fun for you comes from making this a few times and trying it a few different ways. Molten/firmer, eaten warm on the day/cold after a night in the fridge.
Each, I promise, will be delicious.
As for that optional miso… I added the miso in the final test of this cheesecake. And, good grief, the added salt and umami really boosted the brunost flavour. It was really intense, and very nearly too intense. But only nearly… That’s why I’ve left it optional. Though I do recommend those of you keen on trying an even more complex, “grown up” dessert (or if you are a committed smoker whose tastebuds require extra stimulation), then I think you might enjoy giving it a try.
A note on oven cooking
I used to think of oven cooking as a comparatively hands off affair that gave the cook very little agency compared to the agility of the stove.
This dish is a reminder that there is more to oven cooking than the temperature dial.
I wanted a creamy centre with this cake, and, since it’s so easy to overcook, the 30 minutes resting in the fridge before cooking is designed to reduce the internal temperature and help protect the centre that little bit more. Think of it as the opposite of taking your piece of fish out of the fridge an hour before cooking for an even cook. This step just lets the centre cook a little slower, giving you a bit more “wiggle room” to hit that heavenly soft-set mark.
It’s worth remembering this control you have with oven cooking when you have something you might want to keep a little bit under in the centre. I plan to share a story about pithiviers in the coming weeks, individually-sized versions of which are liable to overcooking (a tragedy if using meat such as game birds). A rest in the fridge pre-cooking helps stop that happening, just as we did with this cheesecake today.
A final note on brunost
It is a really hard flavour to describe. Both sweet and savoury and profoundly “milky” if that makes any sense at all. It is, at the very least, complex yet versatile. For all the fun I’ve had using it with sweet dishes, it also adds a real depth to savoury dishes. Grating some into vegetable-based stews, soups, sauces, for example, gives things a real savoury meaty boost.
The only brand I’ve ever used is called Gudbrandsdalen and includes a blend of cream and goat milk. It comes from a company called TINE, and I understand they sell the product under the name Ski Queen (fancy!) in the USA. Those in the UK can find it in larger supermarkets (I believe) and online here.
I hope that helps as I’d love for you to try it.
Thanks for reading this week. This post, like much of my work, is available to free and paid subscribers. If you can afford to support my work for $30/€28/£24 a year, it makes all the difference.
This, like so much of my scientific knowledge of food comes from the life-changing: McGee, Harold. On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. Revised edition, Scribner, 2004.
A more sardonic writer than me would work the burning tunnel cheese story together with the Burnt Basque angle here. Maybe that’s insensitive. *shrugs*
For example, the sour cream Nigella calls for, being a UK writer, is probably about 20% fat. Mine in Finland is at most about 10% fat. This has an impact on the final product so hopefully the detail I’ve given helps.
Fabulous idea...hope they take it up in Norway, Wil! Maybe they already have. Time for a handful of cloudberries to accompany, don't you think?
The cheese sounds delicious. I might look for some here in Australia.
When I make sugar cookies I add cooking salt as opposed to table salt, so it’s a little more granular, but it gives a hit of salt rather than an overall flavour profile thing. Do you think that might work with this instead of miso?