Cottage Cheese
How to Make Cottage Cheese Cottage cheese is the simplest cheese to make and requires no special equipment or ingredients. The only golden rule that you should follow, when making any cheese, is that all your equipment should be squeaky clean and sterilised in boiling water. This is to ensure that unwanted organisms don’t enter the cheese and spoil it.
Unlike other cheeses, cottage cheese does not require any rennet (produced from the lining of a calf’s stomach)to begin it, so is an exceptional cheese for vegetarians. If you might be eager to learn how to make cottage cheese, very first take two pints of fresh milk. This might be either full cream milk or semi-skimmed. The cheese will probably be less profitable with completely skimmed milk. Curdle the milk by adding some sort of starter – sour milk, buttermilk, yoghurt, or even lemon juice. Leave it in a warm place for twenty-four hours. Heat the milk extremely gently in a bowl over a pan of water – that is, you fill a pan with hot water, you place the bowl in the top of the pan, and you put the pan on the stove at a low heat.
As the milk heats, it’ll separate, turning into curds, the a lot more solid wobbly bits, and whey, the pale liquid.
Have ready a sterilised piece of muslin (you sterilise it by putting it into boiling water for a couple of minutes). Line a colander with this muslin and carefully pour the curds and whey into the colander so that the whey drains out via the muslin. Obviously, you do this over the sink or another bowl, unless you would like whey all over the kitchen floor!
Leave the colander to drain for about a quarter of an hour, scraping the curds down the sides of the muslin cloth from time to time until you have a nice mound of cheese at the bottom. Add salt to this, forking it into the cheese. Start with a pinch or two and add extra to taste. Turn the cottage cheese out onto a plate. It will maintain well in the fridge for a week.
This is the simplest way of learning how you can make cottage cheese, but you are able to make the cheese much more fascinating by adding other ingredients. Freshly coarse-ground pepper makes it a spicy cheese. Herbs may be chopped fine and added for variety. In particular, parsley and chives go well with this cheese.
Read more about how to make cottage cheese and how to make risotto from this author.
