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Friday, April 8, 2011

How to Make Homemade Cottage Cheese

If you think making cheese has to be a long, drawn out, and difficult process, you are mistaken. Sure, some cheeses are definitely difficult to make but there are cheese out there that are actually very easy to make at home. The easiest cheese to make in the comfort of your own home is homemade cottage cheese. You can eat it alone, with fruit, incorporate it into recipes or make a cottage cheese-centered recipe like cottage cheese pie.
An Easy Homemade Cottage Cheese Recipe
In order to get started, all you need is skim milk, salt, a six to eight quart steel pot along with an even larger pot, a long-handled knife and spoon, a starter, a storage container, cheesecloth, measuring cups, spoons, and a candy thermometer. You must use skim milk to make cottage cheese because the cream solids don’t stay in the curds. A gallon of skim milk can make you a pound of cottage cheese. As a starter, you can use cultured butter milk, rennet tablets, or a commercial culture.
Your first step is to decide whether you want large curd or small curd homemade cottage cheese. For large curd cottage cheese, use ¼ of a rennet tablet dissolved in two tablespoons of water and one gallon of skim milk (you won’t mix them till later). For small curd cottage cheese, replace a cup of skim milk with a cup of cultured butter milk and use 1/8 of a rennet tablet instead (don’t mix the ingredients yet either).
First, you’ll want to set the pot of milk in the larger pot with water using a double-boil method over the stove. Heat the milk to 80 degrees and check the temperature using a candy thermometer. Once you reach the right temperature, add rennet and stir. Let this sit in a warm room. You’ll know the curd is ready if you stick a knife in the middle and it comes out clean.
Cut the curd by making ½ inch cuts straight up and down and left to right and then diagonally. When you are done cutting, let the curds sit for ten minutes. Once you do so, mix them gently with your hands. Then put the mixture back on the stove and raise the temperature to 100 degrees. Stir it often until you reach 115 degrees. By now the curds should be firm and you can stop heating them.
Your next step will be to pour the curds into a colander lined with cheesecloth to separate it from the whey. Let the curds sit and drain for a few minutes but not too long because they can stick together. Gather the corners of the cheese cloth and dip it in some ice cold water. Put the cheese cloth back on the colander and rinse it with icy cold water until the water that drips out is clear. Gather the corners of the cheese cloth again and drain the water. When it stops dripping, you’ll know that the curds are done.
For every cup of curds, add a teaspoon of salt and stir. To change the flavor of homemade cottage cheese, you can add sour cream, sweet cream, or skim milk. The first batch of homemade cottage cheese is hands down the hardest to make so don’t expect it to be perfect. It won’t take you long to learn how to make a good batch of cottage cheese however so why not give it a shot? Homemade cottage cheese is tastier than store-bought cottage cheese and most importantly, it is healthier.

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