Three Ingredient Beijing Royal Cheese Recipe (北京宫廷奶酪 / 老北京奶酪)

This mildly sweet three ingredient Beijing royal cheese recipe makes the perfect easy and light dessert.

Technically not a cheese, Beijing royal cheese (also known as 北京宫廷奶酪 Běijīng gōngtíng nǎilào – Beijing palace cheese or 老北京奶酪 lǎo běijīng nǎilào – old Beijing cheese) is a soft, custard-like dessert made by curdling milk with sweet fermented rice wine.

Although I make it myself at home with glutinous rice and rice yeast, you can buy sweet fermented rice in jars at Chinese supermarkets, where it's known as 醪糟 láozāo 酒酿 jiǔniàng or 甜米酒 tián mǐjiǔ – it's called different things in different regions of China.

It's only very lightly alcoholic, with a similar taste to Japanese sake (which is, after all, also a type of rice wine) and is naturally sweet – I usually eat it in a sweet hot soup with tangyuan dumplings.

The enzymes in the Chinese fermented rice wine cause dairy milk to solidify, resulting in a super smooth, jiggly pudding. The original recipe for Beijing royal cheese saw a mixture of milk and sweet fermented rice wine being baked and then cooled, and later versions has the mixture steamed instead, or even has the milk heated before adding to the wine. This all makes the curdling reaction faster.

My version, however, requires no heat at all. I discovered this by accident after making this multiple times in different ways to experiment, and I added milk from a saucepan that I thought I'd heated but hadn't at all – and then popped it straight in the fridge. And the reaction still happened.

So it turns out you don't have to heat the mixture at all to make it. As long as you have time to stir three ingredients together and chill them a day in advance, all you have to do is exactly that: stir three ingredients together, and then bung it in the fridge.

You can also watch me make this on my YouTube channel, Tashcakes:

Ready? Let's go.

(Makes two servings.)

Ingredients:

350ml full fat (whole) milk
1 tsp caster sugar
60ml fermented rice wine (squeezed from sweet fermented glutinous rice)

Method:

1. Stir the sugar into the milk until completely dissolved, and set aside.

2. Divide the fermented rice wine between two small serving bowls, so that there's 30ml of the wine in each.

3. Divide the sweetened milk into the two bowls too, also pouring half into each bowl.

4. Give each bowl a quick, gentle stir before covering with clingfilm and chilling in the fridge overnight.

5. Serve the next day, chilled.

Enjoy, and have fun.