Not all manufacturers today delight customers with high quality dairy products. Many people try to buy milk from small markets, private sellers and farmers' shops. You can always make delicious cottage cheese from such a product, like a grandmother in the village.
It is best to pasteurize milk before fermenting in order to increase the shelf life of the curd and make it of higher quality. For pasteurization, milk is poured into a small bowl and placed in a pot of boiling water to heat it to a temperature of 75-85 degrees. It is better to control the degree of heating with a special thermometer. After pasteurization, the milk is cooled to 30-32 degrees in summer and 35-37 in winter, and then a sourdough is added to it (for example, milk fermented the day before). For each liter of liquid, take 30-50 g of starter culture. After stirring the milk, the dishes are wrapped and put away in a warm place.
At this stage, it is important to monitor the fermentation process. Unfermented milk will give little cottage cheese, and from peroxide it will turn out to be dry and sour. An ideal clot is necessarily homogeneous and dense, at a break it is even and shiny (this is checked by removing a piece with a vertically submerged spoon). After removing the foam and the top layer, the curd in the greenish whey is heated in a water bath, stirring gently. The upper limit of heating is 60 degrees: the hotter the product, the drier the cottage cheese will turn out, the more it will crumble. Already at 40 degrees, 2-3 minutes are detected, after which the curd mass is removed from the water bath and transferred to a colander. The curd can be eaten when the whey is drained.
You can get 1 kg of cottage cheese from 7 liters of whole or 9 liters of skim milk. You can store it in the refrigerator for up to two weeks, add sugar, butter, berries, cocoa, nuts, salt, caraway seeds, cucumbers when consumed.
