: Have you tried this or just guessing???

Just research results, and an educated guess. If you want me to experiment with this, I'd be happy to. First I have to get a chunk, which could take a few days.

: I had a piece a while ago that I
: let soak in water for a week with no softening.

Won't dissolve after a week in the water? Sounds like it might be good for sealing seams, making fillets, and maybe an endpour or two

This website: http://www.chowhound.com/boards/general3/messages/4465.html
suggests it should be soluble:
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Subject: Re(1): Kask and Sour Grapes
From: catafishy@msn.com (Maria Eng)
Posted: September 11, 2000 at 17:55:12

In Reply To: an iranian food question

Posted by jen kalb on September 11, 2000 at 15:06:07

Message:
Jen, the only Persian cookbook I have says more or less this:

Kashk - can be had dried in balls or powder and the powder sold in the West might very well be stale. It can be used as is to thicken soups and stews before service or can be ground with water into sauce (as for kashk-e-badenjan). Upon examining the recipes I found that wherever Kashk was required, they also listed sour cream as a substitute.
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There was one other link suggesting this could be an excellent soup base, so I would consider trying boiling water. Smaller sized pieces should absorb the moisture fasster and easier, too.

: The guy at the market said, "The old women know how to melt it". He
: himself did not know the process.

Sounds like he was giving you a compliment. ( If old women know the process, obviously you are not an old woman if you don't know the process.)

Here is one "recipe for making your own. I assume you will need some cooperative sheep for this, too.

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From: kave@scottie.Stanford.EDU (Kave Eshgi)
Subject: Re: Attention all cooks
Date: Mon, 7 Oct 1991 19:22:03 GMT

Dear Mr. Agha Reza Chakeram,

I resisted responding to your question regarding the recipe for
'gharghorout', because I know it would distress you to learn it. But
in my judgement, you are already getting too distressed by your
extreme desire for this delicacy, so here it goes (this is not a joke,
this is how gharghorout is made).

1) Make yoghourt from sheep's milk.
2) Mix the yougourt with water to make 'doogh'. Add some salt.
3) Shake the doogh in a big 'mashk', i.e. a leather watertight
container, for two hours. Put your hand in the mashk and collect the
'kareh', which is a kind of butter that tastes divine.

4) Pour the remaining doogh from the mashk into a big pan. Boil it
till it is the consistency of yoghourt. Then put it into a 'karbas'
bag, i.e. cotton fabric bag, and strain it. Make 'kashk' from the
thickened, strained 'doogh' by shaping it into small balls and drying.

5) Collect the juice dripping from the karbas bag while you are
straining the doogh. Put this juice in another pan, and boil it till
it is the conistency of honey. Remove from heat, and shape into fist
sized balls. Let it cool. You have some fresh 'gharghorout'.

It is interesting to note the reason why all this processing was done
to milk in the first place. In the old days in Iran, there was no way milk
could be stored for any lenght of time. Furthermore, sheep were
usually taken for grazing to far-away places, which made it impossible
to transport their milk to the cities, where the consumers where, in
time. So the shepherd and his family would milk the sheep every day,
and make the butter, (from which 'roghan', or butterr ghee, was made),
kashk, and gharghorout on a daily basis. All these milk products keep
for weeks or months, solving the marketting problem. At the end of the
season, they would return with the sheep, and the accumulated goodies.

I hope you will send me some sample of the 'gharghorout' you are going
to make using my recipe.

Mash Bagher

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The above letter is from http://www.mit.edu/afs/athena/activity/i/iran/recipes/ghareghorout

I'll keep looking for more information on this.

Hope this helps

PGJ