How to make cottage cheese from milk. How to make cottage cheese from milk at home

Everyone knows about the wonderful qualities of cottage cheese and its benefits for our body. But not everyone knows how to make cottage cheese at home.

Cottage cheese is extremely useful for the human body, while a lot of healthy and tasty dishes can be prepared from cottage cheese. To make cottage cheese, we need 2 liters of milk, a clean gauze napkin, two pans that fit one into the other, and a little patience. This process takes me about a day, but the curd turns out well.

Pour the milk into a saucepan, cover it with a lid and put it in a warm place - near the stove or radiator - for such a time during which the milk should turn sour. If you, say, put milk in the morning, then you can be sure that by the morning of the next day it will definitely be ready, although everything also depends on the quality of the milk.

Sometimes, for taste, I add a couple of tablespoons of kefir or low-fat sour cream to the pan. Then I put the pan with sour milk in a large pot, but about the same height, and fill the gap between the walls of the pots with water.

Now you need to put the pans with milk and water on a slow fire and do not leave the stove for a minute. As the water boils, you will see how the sour milk will move away from the edges of the pan, a yellowish liquid will come out. Here it is necessary to urgently remove the pans from the fire, remove the smaller pan and cool the semi-finished product.

Then everything is simple. You put a gauze napkin on the bottom of the sieve and carefully spread the original product on it with a tablespoon. I tie the edges of the gauze together and hang the knot so that the serum gradually drains from it. What remains on the gauze bandage is the cottage cheese.

It is important to remember that there is still a lot of water in fermented milk. The goal is to get rid of the excess. To better prepare cottage cheese from a clot, it is cut into rectangular pieces in a saucepan, and only then they are transferred to gauze.

It is important to separate the whey correctly.

Overheat the water - the cottage cheese will come out crumbly.

If you do not warm it up, it will be difficult to separate the whey, and the curd will become sour.

If you want to get a denser cottage cheese, then put a kitchen board scalded with boiling water on cheesecloth with cottage cheese and place a load on top.

After getting the curd, many people throw away the whey. But in vain! From whey you can get jelly, fruit and berry jellies and even kvass.

Here's how, for example, you can do whey jelly. For 1 kg of whey we take 120 g of sugar. 30 g of gelatin and 80-100 g of berries from jam. Sugar is added to the whey filtered through several layers of gauze and heated. Better in the form of a syrup prepared with whey. Then, after half an hour, pour gelatin. The mixture is heated almost to a boil. After that, berries from jam are added there and hot jelly is poured into molds.

Try it, very tasty!

When it comes to homemade cottage cheese, there is a long row at the collective farm market with jars of sour cream, bottles of milk, fresh butter and large basins, saucepans, plastic containers with cottage cheese: buttery with a creamy tint, snow-white with small grains, medium - milk abundance for every taste.

The same picture, but near the dairy showcase of the supermarket, for some reason, does not cause such an appetite, despite the colorful packaging, a clear, geometric display of goods and neat, smiling saleswomen. You take a pack of cottage cheese, and the parchment packaging is sticky! Or, no, not like that. You pick up a plastic jar of cottage cheese, and it says that the shelf life is 2 weeks, and this is not the most intimidating version of the inscription. You return home with the firm conviction that you are bringing a "pig in a poke" to dinner. A natural dairy product cannot be stored for more than 3 days. Of course, not everything is so terrible. It happens that you are lucky: both the manufacturer is conscientious, and the seller is interested in attracting buyers.

But in the market they will give you a try, and tell you about life, and, in the meantime, you can find out in which meadow the cow grazed, from whose milk cottage cheese was made, what they fed her and when they were vaccinated. Here, this is a real choice, as they say, with taste and sense. Good homemade cottage cheese is always in great demand. If you're late and it's over, don't worry. There is still some milk left, and the village women are always in a hurry to return home early - they have a large household, a lot of work. Therefore, having bargained and bought 5-10 liters of milk, you will still win - they will certainly give way in price. We return home and begin to conjure, or rather, to create: it is this word that is etymologically tied to the word “cottage cheese”.

Homemade curd from curdled milk - preparation of raw materials

The raw material, in this case, is called milk bought on the market. We do not consider options for making cottage cheese from milk bought in a store, since even natural whole milk, but in its original packaging, will not give the desired result. Under production conditions, milk undergoes obligatory pasteurization at high temperatures. As a result, dry curd grain of poor quality is obtained from such milk.

Home-made cottage cheese production differs from industrial methods of milk processing. Pasteurization of milk takes place at temperatures ranging from 630C (long-term processing) to 900C (instant pasteurization). Lactic acid bacteria die at 37-450C. That is, after heating the milk, its fermentation in a natural way becomes impossible. In addition to the fact that during high-temperature processing, milk loses almost all valuable vitamins and amino acids, it loses its ability to coagulate, and it is this quality of the product that underlies the preparation of cottage cheese.

But what about the observance of sanitary standards, and how to cook yogurt cottage cheese at home in order to get a natural product and, at the same time, protect yourself from pathogenic microbes?

The answer to this question lies in the ability of lactic acid bacteria to produce lactic acid. Raw cow's milk contains 96% of harmful microorganisms and 4% of lactobacilli, but these four percent are enough to create an acidic environment and destroy pathogenic microorganisms.

If it is so easy to get rid of harmful organisms, then why is milk subjected to pasteurization in factories? Everything is simple. Milk is brought to the dairies in tons, it is collected on farms and in private households, pouring everything together into large tanks. With such volumes, it is difficult to keep track of the purity of raw materials, especially since milk is a perishable product and it must be brought for processing quickly. A housewife buys milk from one seller. It is no coincidence that at the beginning of the article the personal communication with the seller in the market was mentioned in such detail.

What else is the process of preparing milk and how to cook yogurt cottage cheese at home?

Depending on the fat content in milk, cottage cheese can also be of different fat content. Whole homemade milk can contain up to 30% fat. Therefore, if you want the cottage cheese to be dietary (fat-free) or bold, then you need to skim the cream. Let the milk stand in a glass bottle so that the fatty particles float to the surface. It is convenient to skim cream at home in the following way: a plastic tube is inserted into a bottle of settled milk (a tube from a medical drip injection system is suitable). The tube must touch the bottom. Lower the other end into another container, located lower in level than the bottle. Transfer the milk to another container until only the fatty part remains in the bottle. You can make sour cream from the cream, and leave the drained skimmed milk in a saucepan for ripening and further cooking the cottage cheese.

This completes the preparation of milk for making homemade yogurt curd. We turn to the question of the main technological points for obtaining cottage cheese.

Homemade cottage cheese from curdled milk - fermentation of milk

Milk will turn sour on its own if you put the container in a warm place for several hours. Then what are we talking about? That it is possible, for example, to speed up this process.

In fresh milk to obtain curdled milk (without this product, cottage cheese cannot be obtained in any way) is added for fermentation:

Lemon juice or citric acid solution - one tablespoon per liter of warm (25-370C) milk;

Fermented milk products - sour cream, kefir, ready-made yogurt, natural yogurt. At the same time, milk is also preheated to create the most favorable conditions for the vital activity of lactic acid bacteria;

Special starter cultures - they can be purchased at a pharmacy or specialized points of sale (acidophilus, acedin-pepsin, Laktona and others). They are added to milk according to the attached instructions for use.

The yogurt is ready, only this is half the battle. We turn to the main goal - getting cottage cheese out of it.

Homemade yogurt curd - the main technological points

First you need to know that milk is about 80% water, and only 20% solids. Hence - from a liter of milk you can get no more than 200 g of cottage cheese, and if the milk is skimmed, then the weight of the finished product decreases in proportion to the proportion of fat in the composition of milk. As you know, fat also consists of water and retains moisture, which means that skimmed milk curd will turn out dry, with less whey content. As they say, it's a matter of taste, but if you need to get fat-free cottage cheese with a sufficient degree of moisture, then you must strictly observe the technological aspects.

Fermented milk should be heated, but not overheated, so that the milk protein does not curdle to a rubbery consistency. During the heating of yogurt, you need to constantly stir the mass to ensure uniform heating. The temperature of heating at home is rarely determined with a thermometer, but approximately the separation of milk protein begins at 50 ° C. At this time, the solid mass begins to rise to the surface of the pan. In order not to overdry the cottage cheese, turn off the stove and cool the whey together with the formed clot to 20-250C. Then you can start pressing. It is very convenient for this purpose to line a colander with gauze, installed over a container for draining whey. Pour the contents of the heated saucepan through a colander. Part of the serum will drain immediately, easily separated from the clot. The whey remaining in the almost finished curd is separated by pressing, controlling the moisture content of the finished product at your discretion. To do this, you need to tie the ends of the lined gauze and hang the cottage cheese over the dishes for further draining of the liquid. In the same way, but with the use of oppression, rennet cheese is obtained: cottage cheese tied in a gauze napkin is placed under oppression to obtain pressed cottage cheese.

This is the easiest way to get homemade cottage cheese from curdled milk, known to mankind for more than one hundred, maybe even a thousand years. Well, of course, I want, as always, diversity. Then we attach more complex, but interesting options to the main recipe.

Recipe 1. Curd mass, fruit

Compound:

Wild berries (in assortment) 300 g

Fat-free cottage cheese 700 g

Fructose 250 g

Water 100 ml

Cooking method:

Sprinkle strawberries, raspberries or other berries of your choice with fructose and wait for the juice to separate. Mash them, add water and boil for 5-10 minutes. After cooling the fruit mass, rub it through a sieve to remove the grains and skins. Beat the cottage cheese with a blender, gradually pouring in the fruit syrup.

Recipe 2. Cheesecakes, vanilla with raisins - the favorite taste of childhood

Compound:

• Vanillin, crystalline

  Raisins, light

Cooking:

If the cottage cheese is fatty and moist, then it is not necessary to add cream. We moisten the dried curd grain with cream (10-15%). We choose the proportions at our discretion. We combine all the components in a blender, and add the raisins at the end, to the whipped and fluffy curd mass, and mix it thoroughly.

Recipe 3. Cottage cheese snack, spicy

Compound:

Cherry 10 pieces

Curd 200 g

Garlic 10 g

Basil, red

Parsley

Ground hot pepper

Cooking:

Wash the tomatoes, cut off the part with the stalk. You can do it beautifully, with a zigzag line. Remove the core with seeds with a spoon. Finely chop the greens, grate the garlic on the smallest grater. Put the cottage cheese in the blender bowl (it is better to use fatty), add the prepared herbs and spices. Smash into a paste and stuff the tomatoes. Place hats with ponytails on top of stuffed vegetables.

Too sour or too dry cottage cheese can be corrected. Pour fresh whole milk into a saucepan and heat it up to 35-400C. Put the cottage cheese that needs improvement into the warmed milk and leave for 10-12 hours. Then strain through cheesecloth.

For long-term storage, cottage cheese can be frozen, but first place it in portions in containers and seal tightly. Immediately after defrosting, cottage cheese should be used. Freezing it again will turn it into useless biomass.

Curd for storage can be salted. This method of storing cottage cheese was used by our ancestors. If you then need to prepare a dish of sweet cottage cheese, then it can be washed with water and squeezed.

Everyone in our family loves cottage cheese. Making it is a pleasure. There are different ways to make cottage cheese at home, for example, cottage cheese can be made from kefir, from curdled sour milk when heated, and even from sour cream (shop). For myself, I found the perfect recipe for fatty, tender cottage cheese, which I want to talk about.

Very important point- delicious cottage cheese is obtained from homemade milk. Buying homemade milk is always more interesting, firstly, you can collect cream from it. To do this, it must stand in the refrigerator for several hours. The cream will rise to the top and be easily removed. I usually get about 700-800 grams of finished cottage cheese from 3 liters of homemade milk.

The next important point. We have already said that sour milk is needed for cottage cheese. Regarding souring, I would like to say that it should turn sour at room temperature, and not in the refrigerator. Otherwise, the curd will have a slight unpleasant odor. Therefore, if the milk begins to sour and you intend to make cottage cheese out of it, then it is better to take it out of the refrigerator and leave it at room temperature. How long will it sour? In winter, usually about a day. In the summer, in the heat in just a couple of hours. Don't overdo the milk! As soon as it turns sour, immediately take on the cottage cheese, otherwise it will peroxide and the cottage cheese will turn out sour.

If you don't feel like waiting for the milk to turn sour on its own, then "help" it. Add something sour to the milk: a piece of cottage cheese, sour cream, sour milk or lemon juice.

Put the sour milk in a saucepan in a water bath. We heat up to about 40 degrees. This temperature will be enough for the serum to depart. Done, and now the most delicious. To make the cottage cheese tender, fatty and tasty, we will do several manipulations. Take sour cream and salt.

Add sour cream to milk.

Do not stir, so as not to disturb the structure of the curd.

Add a pinch of salt if you like salted cottage cheese.

And pour everything on a linen, gauze or waffle napkin.

We tie it with a bag and hang it for 40 minutes so that all the serum is glassed.

After 40 minutes, you can untie and enjoy homemade fatty cottage cheese.

Another photo of homemade cottage cheese. Bon appetit!

The most delicious cottage cheese is obtained only from homemade milk with good fat content. It is very easy to independently adjust the level of moisture, friability, softness of cottage cheese, depending on personal preferences. In addition, you can be completely sure of its high quality. The by-product of production will be whey, which is very useful for the body in itself, and is also used in some dough recipes or as a base for okroshka instead of kvass. In this article, we will tell you how to make cottage cheese from milk, how to choose the right milk, how to ferment it, how to work with yogurt and how to get delicious homemade cottage cheese from sour milk.
The process of preparing cottage cheese, of course, takes a lot of time, but in fact, at each stage, one or two simple manipulations are required, the rest will be done by lactic acid bacteria and time.
For the preparation of cottage cheese, we will use homemade cow's fresh milk of good quality, without any impurities and additives. If you don’t have the opportunity to buy homemade milk, then you can use store-bought milk, but you also need to choose it correctly, so store-bought milk for making cottage cheese:
milk should be high fat content of 3.2%;
milk should not contain preservatives or antibiotics, very often they are found in milk with an increased shelf life.

Taste Info Dairy desserts

Ingredients

• gauze or linen/cotton towel

How to make cottage cheese from milk

Stage 1: Working with milk
First you need to evaluate the quality of milk. If a layer of cream is clearly visible on the surface of the milk in a jar or bottle, then the yield of cottage cheese will be greater.

Such milk must be poured into glass, earthenware or ceramic dishes, where the souring process will take place.


Metal containers are not suitable! Place the jar with milk for about two days in a dark place, preferably closer to a heat source, for example, in a cabinet next to a working refrigerator or stove. In the refrigerator itself, milk will not turn sour, but will only spoil! After a couple of days, you need to check the container in which you can already see not milk, but good rustic yogurt.
If you put milk for souring in an open sunny place, it can turn sour very quickly, you need to carefully monitor it, as it peroxides milk in the sun very quickly.

Properly sour milk turns into a dense thick mass, which exfoliates from the whey. This moment needs to be controlled, because. from unsour milk, a smaller amount of cottage cheese will be obtained, and from peroxidized milk, the cottage cheese will turn out not so tasty, it will turn out more sour.


In order for milk to sour faster, you can add to it:
a piece of black bread;
a spoonful of sour cream or kefir;
lemon juice or citric acid.
Stage 2: Working with curdled milk
Yogurt needs to be heated in a saucepan over low heat, I cook cottage cheese on an electric stove and use the most minimal fire. You can warm up in a water bath, i.e. in one larger pot, put a smaller pot with yogurt.
In order to make cottage cheese, sour milk needs to be warmed up, and not brought to a boil, i.e. temperature should be around 40 degrees.




During cooking, the heating of the product is easiest to check with your finger. If a pleasant warmth is felt, and not a burning temperature, then everything is in order. The process takes about 15-20 minutes. The longer the curdled milk is heated, the tougher the cottage cheese will come out. It is advisable to constantly stir the curdled milk, or rather, distribute the jelly-like mass throughout the entire volume of the product.


Large parts of sour milk warm up worse, and cooking will go unevenly.

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Stage 3: Working with cottage cheese
We practically talked about how to make cottage cheese from milk, in fact, after heating, the cottage cheese is ready. It remains only to separate it from the serum. For this, a sieve and a clean kitchen towel or gauze folded in several layers are used. The sieve must be placed over a deep container and lined with a cloth.




After the curd mass has been poured into such a structure, most of the whey is filtered into the dishes, and the curd itself remains inside the sieve on the fabric.




But such cottage cheese still contains a lot of whey, so it must be hung in the same towel for the final decanting of the liquid. Under the makeshift bag of cottage cheese, of course, you need to place a plate or cup, where some more whey will accumulate.

In this form, the cottage cheese "hangs" for several hours. The longer the whey is decanted, the drier the curd is.
Wonderful, tender, healthy homemade cottage cheese from milk is ready!