Milk, one of the ingredients of brunost.
Brunost is the Swedish and Norwegian name for a soft Scandinavian cheese made from heated milk, cream and whey. As the milk sugar caramelizes as the mixture cooks, brunost tastes sweet. When packed in squares, it is slightly firmer than cream cheese. Its flavor is often compared to dulce de leche, a popular sweet in Latin American countries. It is commonly eaten in sandwiches.
Brunost is popular in Norway.
This caramel-flavored cheese is popular in several countries, including Norway, Sweden, and Iceland. Although generally the same in different areas, this cheese has several names that vary from place to place, including myseost in Denmark, gjetost in Norway, and mesost in Sweden. Most brunost is made in Norway and Sweden and exported to other countries.
Its texture is different from other cheeses as it tends to be stickier with the consistency of fudge. It is usually served thinly sliced, but can also be squeezed into a tube. A common way to serve brunost is with a simple open sandwich, which consists of thin slices of this sweet cheese on a single piece of sandwich bread. Another sweet cheese called prim has a similar flavor and is used in similar applications, but it is softer and easier to spread.
Historically, brunost was made with only goat’s milk, but recipes have grown over time to include a mixture of cow’s milk and goat’s milk, or just plain cow’s milk. While the goat’s milk used in the original brunost is used for many similar purposes as cow’s milk, such as making cheese, butter, and yogurt, goat’s milk has some differences. One of the main differences is that goat’s milk does not need to be homogenized. Goat’s milk fat remains evenly suspended in the milk, unlike cow’s milk where the cream separates from the rest of the milk.
Although the Latin American candy called dulce de leche has a caramel flavor similar to brunost, its ingredients and texture are different. Dulce de leche is made from milk and sugar boiled until golden brown. It lacks the whey and sour cream that are present in brunost, and the resulting texture is more pudding-like than cheese-like. Because it is more of a pudding than a viable spread, dulce de leche is often eaten with a spoon or sprinkled on other sweets such as cakes, cookies, and muffins.