How to cook cottage cheese at home. How to make delicious homemade cottage cheese from milk How to quickly make cottage cheese at home
1. Cottage cheese can be made in two ways: with and without heat. This is a matter of taste and convenience. However, cottage cheese without heating is a little more tender.
2. If you make cottage cheese from milk, take a rustic one. Especially if according to the recipe it should turn sour. But you can use store-bought milk of any fat content. The fatter it is, the fatter the curd will be.
3. Kefir can also be taken in any fat content. can only be used if you heat it up.
4. The quantity and taste of cottage cheese depend on the quality of the original product. So when buying milk or kefir, you should not skimp.
5. You can cook cottage cheese both in a saucepan and in a water bath. Again, this is a matter of convenience. You will find a description of the cooking process in a water bath in the recipe for kefir cottage cheese.
6. It is better to heat dairy products in a heavy-bottomed aluminum or stainless steel pan. Enamelware is not suitable: everything in it can burn.
7. Cottage cheese spread on a colander covered with several layers of gauze. Place a saucepan or some other container under the colander so that the whey flows there.
8. If you leave the cottage cheese in a colander for a couple of hours or even less, then it will turn out wet.
9. To make cottage cheese dry and crumbly, you need to tie the ends of the gauze and hang the knot over the sink or pan for several hours or even all night. The time depends on your preference: the longer the whey drains, the drier the curd will be.
10. And in order for the cottage cheese to keep its shape, you can put it under oppression.
11. Homemade cottage cheese is stored in the refrigerator for no more than four days.
This is the traditional way of making cottage cheese.
Ingredients
- 2 liters of milk.
Cooking
Leave the milk in a warm place for 1-3 days. Don't mix it up. The time depends on the temperature in the room: the warmer, the faster the milk will sour. To speed up the process, you can add 2 tablespoons of sour cream or a piece of black to the milk.
Milk should not go sour in the refrigerator. There it will acquire an unpleasant odor and may begin to taste bitter. If you notice that the milk in the refrigerator is starting to turn sour, it's best to take it out so that it sours in the right conditions.
The sour milk will look like a soft, thick jelly, and whey will begin to appear around it. Pour the milk into a saucepan and place over low heat.
Boil, stirring occasionally. Do not overheat the milk, it should be slightly warm. After 10-15 minutes from the start of cooking, curd clots will begin to form in the pan. Remove the pan from the heat and let stand for the same amount of time. Then put the cottage cheese in a colander and let it drain.
2. Homemade cottage cheese from milk without heating
Ready cottage cheese will be more tender than in the first case.
Ingredients
- 2 liters of milk.
From the indicated amount, about 400 g of cottage cheese will be obtained.
Cooking
Let the milk sour, as in the first method. Do not heat the thickened mass, but immediately fold it onto gauze.
Thanks to lemon juice, milk will turn sour much faster.
Ingredients
- 2 liters of milk;
- 1 lemon.
From the specified amount, about 350 g of cottage cheese will be obtained.
Cooking
Pour milk into a saucepan. If you are using country milk, then bring it to a boil and reduce the heat. If the milk is already pasteurized, then just warm it up, but do not boil it.
Ingredients
- 1 liter of kefir.
Cooking
You will need two pots of different sizes. One of them should fit freely into the other. Fill a large saucepan halfway with water. Bring water to a boil over high heat.
Pour kefir into another saucepan. After boiling, put a small saucepan in a large one and heat the kefir over low heat.
Kefir should break up into curd and whey. When this happens, remove the pan from the heat and let it sit for 10 minutes. Transfer the cottage cheese to a colander and let the whey drain.
And from frozen kefir you will get the most delicate airy curd, reminiscent of cream cheese. It can be mixed with herbs, salted and used for cooking.
Ingredients
- 1 liter of kefir.
From the indicated amount, about 200 g of cottage cheese will be obtained.
Cooking
It is best to take kefir in a bag: the bottle can crack when frozen, and it will be difficult to extract the petrified kefir from it. If only bottled kefir is at hand, simply pour it into a plastic bag and tie it very tightly.
Place the bag in the freezer overnight. Kefir should become like a piece of ice. If after 10-12 hours kefir does not become hard as a stone, then it is of poor quality. From such a product, liquid cottage cheese will be obtained, resembling rather sour cream.
Carefully cut open the bag, put the contents in a colander and wrap in cheesecloth.
Leave kefir at room temperature until completely defrosted.
In a jar of milk, add a spoonful of curdled milk or sour cream. You can first remove the cream from the milk, as they will still peel off during fermentation. We cover the jar of milk with a towel or napkin and leave it in a warm place for about a day.
Souring time depends on the room temperature. You should get a thick, jelly-like curdled milk (if you bought a can of curdled milk or a whole can of milk turned sour, we skip these steps).
When the yogurt is ready, put the stand you have on the bottom of a large saucepan. There are special ones for sterilizing blanks, but you can simply put a few tin lids, forks, spoons, etc. on the bottom. This is necessary so that the jar does not crack when heated. For example, I used a gas stove burner stand.
We put a jar of yogurt in a saucepan on a stand and carefully pour hot water over the shoulders. (I got a little smaller, the pan is too small. But this did not affect the quality of the cottage cheese!)
We put the pot with the jar on the smallest burner on the smallest fire and heat it for about 1 hour.
When steam begins to rise above the surface of the water, we begin to check our yogurt more often. Serum should clearly begin to separate from the thick fraction. Then remove the jar from the pan and cool to room temperature.
We hang the cottage cheese in gauze for 8-10 hours, substituting a bowl for whey.
After 8-10 hours, the cottage cheese will decrease in volume, thicken, but retain softness.
Enjoy! Bon appetit!
But often this is achieved through the use of preservatives, thickeners, vegetable fats and flavors. Old recipes for homemade cottage cheese are in demand among adherents of proper nutrition. And not by chance! The fermented milk product contains vitamins of groups B, PP, E and A, as well as minerals and trace elements. You can cook it yourself in different ways.
The five most commonly used ingredients in recipes are:
It is important to remember the rules: milk must not be boiled, do not use enameled dishes for fermentation, do not keep the fermented product in gauze for a long time, otherwise it will become dry, heat the liquid for fermentation only on low heat, use natural milk. Fresh cottage cheese goes well with berries. Strawberries, blueberries, currants or cranberries with delicate curd cream and yoghurt sauce - a great breakfast for the whole family. For gourmets, professional chefs prepare savory dishes. For example, a casserole with vegetables will be appreciated not only by girls on a diet, but also by men who are intensively building muscles.
Among fermented milk products, the most delicious and most nutritious is cottage cheese.
And if there are children in your house, then the cottage cheese should always be in your refrigerator. This product is also useful for dieters and people with health problems.
It contains proteins and fats, as well as mineral elements, such as:
- Iron
- Calcium
- Phosphorus
- Magnesium
And since the above substances that the body receives with food have a positive effect on all vital activity in general, such a product should be in the diet regularly.
Such homemade cottage cheese can, no doubt, be added to the diet of children. Every mother makes sure that her child gets the best, his food is natural and nutritious, so homemade fermented milk product choice of the best mothers.
Even an inexperienced housewife can cook cottage cheese at home. There are many cooking options. The choice will depend on what product should be obtained, whether you want fatter cottage cheese or, conversely, more dietary. You can also independently adjust the consistency of the finished dish, make it, for example, more crumbly or soft.
Homemade milk with good fat content- the main component of a delicious curd. After cooking, waste remains in the form of whey, which, if desired, can also be used in cooking. Such whey is natural and useful, it can be added to the dough or used in okroshka.
How to choose the main ingredient and what are the conditions for obtaining curdled milk? We will talk about this in detail in this article.
Cooking cottage cheese is a long process, but in fact at each stage you will need to do a little manipulation, which will take little time. The lactic acid bacteria will do the rest in the cooking process for you.
Milk for making homemade cottage cheese can be used any. It can be both homemade and store-bought pasteurized. The main condition for the ingredient used:
- Increased fat. If this is store-bought milk, then the fat content should be at least 3.2%.
- Milk cannot contain preservatives and antibiotics, so purchased milk should have the shortest shelf life;
- Milk should be of high quality and fresh.
Cottage cheese can be made from absolutely any milk. Pasteurized milk and even lactose-free milk can make an excellent product. And if this is village milk that was used by the separator, then cottage cheese can also be made from the so-called waste. The main condition is that the product is fresh and of high quality.
From 1 liter of milk, you can get a maximum of 300 grams of finished cottage cheese.
How milk turns sour
The process of obtaining curdled milk is quite simple.. At the very beginning, the milk should turn sour well. The result should be sour milk. There are many ways, for example, you can:
If you decide to use the standard method - keep warm, then you can do this in the following way: put a jar of milk in a warm place, for example, near the battery and leave it there for about a day. To make the process faster, you can put a crust of black bread in a jar.
Important! Milk must not be stirred during the entire fermentation time. When thick lumps and bubbles appear in the jar, the mixture is ready. At the end of fermentation, yogurt will look like jelly. To check the yogurt for readiness, stick a spoon into it, if the ingredient is ready, then it will be a thick mass.
If the milk was bought in a store, then the curdled milk will rise closer to the surface, and the whey will be at the bottom.
Make sure that the yogurt does not stand for too long, otherwise it will oversour, and the finished curd product will turn out sour.
How to cook homemade cottage cheese for a child
Making cottage cheese from milk for a child is easy, milk does not even need to be sour.
We take milk and kefir. You can take any quantity, depending on the desired amount of cottage cheese. The main thing is that kefir should be half as much as milk.
Pour milk into a saucepan and bring to a boil. Pour kefir into the heated liquid, and boil for 10 minutes over low heat. As soon as the milk curdles, the resulting mass must be poured into cheesecloth and allowed to drain well. What happened inside the gauze is the finished cottage cheese for the crumbs.
If desired, you can add fruits or berries and beat it with a blender. You can also add yogurt or sugar. Using such cottage cheese, you can bake cottage cheese or casserole. All these dishes will be incredibly tasty and will only benefit your child.
Classic homemade cottage cheese recipe
We need 3 liters of milk. Approximately 1-3 days will be spent on souring.
After you have decided on the choice of milk, taking into account all the recommendations and brought it home, you need to pour it into a clean jar or immediately into a saucepan for further fermentation. Dishes can be enameled or stainless steel.
After that, the curdled milk is heated, as a result of which the fermented milk breaks up into two components, one of which is cottage cheese.
So, put the pan on the stove, but do not wait for the boil. When the white flakes separate from the whey, remove the pan from the heat.
Next, we take a colander and put clean gauze into it, folded several times and drain the whole mass. When all the whey drains, the finished curd mass will remain in the gauze. Such cottage cheese will be tender, with a layer.
If you want crumbly cottage cheese, then you need to leave the mass in gauze to drain for a longer time, for example, at night.
From three liters of milk, you will end up with about 600-800 grams of a fermented milk product.
Curd recipe in a water bath
We have already discussed how to get yogurt from milk. So this recipe needs take ready-made yogurt made in any way you like and put in a saucepan.
Next, you need to take a pot that would fit dishes with curdled milk, and pour water into it. But you need to do this so that the water does not come into contact with the bottom of the smaller pan. We put the finished structure of two pots on the fire and bring water to a boil. After a few minutes, the serum will begin to separate.
You can add a little fire, but watch out so that the yogurt does not boil. It is necessary to wait until the curd clots appear, sinking to the bottom of the pan.
The process of thermal exposure is completed and you can remove the pan from the heat, let the resulting liquid cool.
Cooking cottage cheese on kefir
If there is no milk in your refrigerator, and you don’t want to go far to the store, but there is a pack of kefir, then you can also make a delicious curd product from it.
Kefir should be:
- Fresh.
- Thick, like curdled milk.
So, pouring 1 liter of kefir into the right dish, put it in a water bath. On medium heat, or even less, keep the liquid for about 30 minutes. Next, cover with a lid and let cool.
The curd is ready. The pumping procedure is the same, through gauze or a sieve.
How to make fat-free cottage cheese
This recipe is suitable for diet food., breakfast with low-fat homemade cottage cheese will be useful and will not harm the figure.
For such cottage cheese, milk must also be skimmed. Milk with 1% fat can be bought at the store. You can buy homemade or store-bought milk with a fat content of 3.2% and, in the process of settling, remove the cream from above several times.
To ferment such milk, you need to put 2 tablespoons of fat-free kefir in a liter of raw materials used. So the fermentation process will noticeably accelerate.
From 1 liter of curdled milk you get about 250 grams of cottage cheese.
Ready fat-free cottage cheese will not be as loose as usual, but it retains all the beneficial properties of this fermented milk product.
Making cottage cheese from milk at home is easy and anyone can do it. The main thing is desire, free time and a recipe that will be exactly followed. Without a doubt, it is easier and faster to purchase a finished product, but it will be difficult to predict whether it will be useful and whether it will be tasty. You cook homemade cottage cheese from obviously fresh and high-quality ingredients, and, therefore, the result will please you in any case. Homemade cottage cheese - useful and nutritious. Such a product is suitable for the nutrition of the most demanding consumers: for children, the elderly, for those who follow their figure.