Continuing down my "what can I do with a gallon of milk series" 🙂.
The other night I ran out of cottage cheese, so tonights project, making cottage cheese. Its so simple to make and best of all, there are no added filler ingredients you save money. There is a way to do it that you would use vinegar, instead of rennet, but this yeilds more of a soft cheese called farmers cheese. Your curds arent as firm or large, but it works and tastes very good.
What do you need? In this process you need milk, pot, thermometer, something to drain with...Junket rennet, heavy cream, salt and sour cream. There are a lot of different recipes and just gear it to your tastes.
Here is what I did:
Heat your milk slowly to 80 degrees and turn off heat. Lightly stir in rennet. Rennet is used in making cheese and I think most health food stores would carry it. I like the liquid over the other option, a tablet. On the rennet it tells you 5 drops per quart of milk. You stir the rennet into just a small amount of water first, then add the water mixture to the milk and very lightly and gently stir into the milk. (if you were using vinegar instead you would just put some in the milk here) Let sit for a couple hours. Do not stir it during this resting time!
After a couple hours your milk should resemble yogurt with a firm top. Gently stir thru it with a whisk and slowly start to bring temperature up to 110-115 degrees. Immediately drain into a cheese cloth or cloth that would drain well. An old, but clean tee shirt works. Just boil it first to get out any residual detergents.
Let it hang for about 30 minutes to drain. It will look like a firm ball of cheese. Put this in a bowl and gently break the curds apart to the desired size. In a separate bowl add 3 tablespoons of sour cream, 3 tablespoons heavy cream and salt to taste, I used about 1 teaspoon. Premix these then add into curds and gently, but throughly mix. Adjust to taste and consistency. You have just made cottage cheese!
Don't throw out your whey, we will do something else with that.
Soooo yummy!!! There are so many things we don't know how wonderful they truly taste, because all we have ever had was store bought.