Cottage cheese - a fermented milk product made from fermented milk - is very useful for human health. Most housewives prefer to buy it in stores or markets, but if you cook it yourself, you can be sure of its quality and freshness. To prepare cottage cheese, you only need milk: you can take fresh, but sour is best.
What you need to make cottage cheese
Since cottage cheese is based on milk, the taste, useful characteristics and quality of the final product depend on its quality. If you make cottage cheese without adhering to the following rules, then you can get not just not useful, but harmful and even dangerous product, since it may contain microorganisms. Therefore, it is advisable to take store-bought pasteurized milk, which has already been processed and is safe for health.
If you want to cook cottage cheese from raw milk, then it must be carefully processed - boiled.
Milk should turn sour in room conditions, then it will turn into yogurt in a day in warm weather or in three days in winter. If you add a little black bread to it, then the process will go faster. Do not stir the milk while it is sour.
The longer the milk sours, the more sour the curd will turn out. But if the milk is not fermented, then the cottage cheese will not taste good.
If the milk is fresh, then another important ingredient in the curd preparation process is sourdough. It is advisable to take a real curd sourdough, but you can use yogurt or sour cream. Sourdough is added to warm milk and left in a warm place until sour.
Take clean cheesecloth, a colander, and a saucepan. You can make a special linen bag in the shape of a cone, it is more convenient to use it than gauze, which also needs to be constantly changed.
Recipe for making cottage cheese
Separate the fatty top layer from the sour milk, pour it into a saucepan and put on low heat, bringing to 50 degrees. By this time, the milk has separated into curd curd and whey. It is very important not to digest the liquid, otherwise the cottage cheese will turn out to be tough, like rubber, all the more you do not need to boil sour milk.
Put cheesecloth in several layers on a colander so that the edges hang over the sides, put it in a container and pour the resulting mass into a colander. Hang a rolled cheesecloth or clot bag overnight over a container to drain the serum. The whey can then be used to make pancakes or a drink - it quenches your thirst perfectly.
After a few hours, you can squeeze out the remaining whey by placing a bag of cottage cheese under a press. The result is a delicate, crumbly, rather moist cottage cheese, which, like all homemade products, tastes better than store-bought. The longer the bag is held under the press, the drier the product will be. Homemade cottage cheese is stored in the refrigerator for no more than two to three days, it is most delicious fresh when freshly cooked.
