Do you want to try yourself in cheese making? Then start with curd cheese with garlic and herbs. There are a lot of options for cooking it at home. You can use one spice or mix different herbs.
Use sheep's milk for cooking, it will add a special piquancy to the finished product, and herbs and garlic will fill the homemade cheese with their aromas.
Curd cheese with herbs and garlic
For cooking, you need to take:
- cottage cheese - 1 kg;
- baking soda - 1 tsp;
- cilantro - 50 g;
- butter - 100 g;
- sheep's milk (fat) - 1 l;
- raw eggs (yolks) - 3 pcs.;
- salt (finely ground) - 1 tsp;
- garlic (cloves) - 4-5 pcs.
Just before boiling the cheese, you need to prepare the herbs and garlic. Cilantro should be thoroughly rinsed, laid out on a towel to dry and then chopped as hard as possible. Garlic cloves should be peeled, rinsed and crushed with a press. Then both ingredients should be mixed into one mass.
Next, you need to take an enamel pan and put cottage cheese in it, pour it with cold sheep's milk, mix the mass and put on low heat. Without stopping stirring, let the mass warm up well, without bringing it to a boil. When you see the milk starting to curl in the pan, remove the pan of curd from the heat.
Now you need to prepare a place for filtering the curd mass. Take another saucepan and place a colander on it. For further action, you need gauze, it should be covered with a colander. Do not pull the cheesecloth tightly, but place it in a depression in a colander. Then pour the prepared curd mass into a colander through cheesecloth, tie the latter in the form of a knot and hang it so that the whey can drain freely from the curd. The time for this process depends on the final consistency you want the cheese to take. The longer the whey is decanted, the denser the curd mass and future cheese will be.
When enough whey has been decanted from the resulting mass, put the cottage cheese in a saucepan, add chopped cilantro with garlic to it and mix everything well. Separate the yolks from raw eggs and add them to the curd mass, then add finely ground salt and baking soda there, mix everything thoroughly. The butter should be slightly softened (do not melt!) And also added to the mixture. Stir the cheese mass again and put the pan on low heat.
When heated and interacted with baking soda, the curd mass will begin to melt and eventually turn into cheese. Stirring should not be stopped until the end of cooking. The cheese mold must be greased inside with oil and then put the finished mass into it. Next, cool the mold with cheese and put it in the refrigerator. As soon as the cheese mass hardens, you can put the finished product on a plate.
Curd cheese with garlic and dill
This is a recipe for the simplest homemade cheese that does not require additional heat treatment. To prepare it, you need to take:
- dill greens (chopped) - 2-3 tbsp.;
- fatty homemade cottage cheese - 500 g;
- garlic (cloves) - 2 pcs.;
- finely ground salt - 1 tbsp.
Dill greens should first be thoroughly rinsed, dried and chopped. Peel and crush the garlic cloves with a press. Fat homemade cottage cheese should be put in a bowl, sprinkled with fine salt, add chopped dill and chopped garlic to the mass, mix everything thoroughly.
Take a piece of clean gauze, put the curd mass in the center and tie the fabric with a tight knot. Then you should place cheesecloth with cottage cheese under oppression, for this you can use two cutting boards installed above the basin or pan. A knot with curd mass should be placed between the boards, a load should be placed on top. Leave the curd for 2-3 days to strain and condense. The finished cheese should be carefully removed from the cheesecloth and put on a plate. Store cheese with garlic and dill in the refrigerator.
