A bowl of Cottage Cheese |
This is something that was made regularly at our farm when I
was growing up. Cottage cheese is also
one of the simplest cheeses to make. My
mother made it from naturally soured
milk that is hung up in an old pillow
case or some similar cloth bag to allow the curds to be separated from the
whey that was filtered off through the cloth bag.
You can use either milk that is store bought or milk
that you produce on your own farm. Place
the milk into a shallow container and cover to allow it to naturally sour. Using milk that hasn’t been homogenized works
better!
This is the way the author’s mother made cottage cheese by
the use of wild bacteria to sour the milk and straining it through a cloth to
separate the curds from the whey. There
is a better way. This method was handed
down in her family for many generations on the family farm in Bavaria .
The modern method of making cottage cheese is similar, but
by using a butter milk culture you are sure of your consistency and don’t have
to fear that your cheese making efforts don’t lead to either a mess or the
possibility the cheese you make could cause you to get sick.
You can either buy buttermilk at your local market for this
at you local market, or make it yourself.
There are two different processes that you can do to make
buttermilk. One process is to make
butter. This is done by churning the
cream until the butter separates from the butter milk. Most people don’t own a churn, so you can
also make butter by placing the cream in a large bowl and stirring it with a
large spoon until the butter separates.
The other method works by adding some acid, the juice of one
lemon, to the milk and let it set around in a cool place for 10 to 12 hours,
and through natural processes it will turn to buttermilk.
Whichever method you choose this is a basic process for
making practically all chesses.
Fresh buttermilk has to be “young” look at the expiration
date listed on the carton to see how old it is, and buy the one with the latest
expiration date. If you use old
buttermilk, the bacteria have lost their strength, and will not work right.
Yet another method for making cottage cheese calls for the
use of rennet, an enzyme that you can buy in your local market.
Cottage cheese culture is made from a small quantity of
cottage cheese added to a pint of buttermilk allowing it to incubate at room
temperature for 3 or 4 hours before adding it to a gallon of milk that is in a
large bowl or pot. This will yield about
1.3 pounds of cottage cheese along with a considerable amount of whey that is
filtered off.
The most common method of making cottage cheese is called
the acid, or small curd method, and takes about 14 hours to complete. The other method uses rennet, or the large
curd method. This requires about 5 hours
too complete.
Either method requires that you keep the milk at 72 to 75
degrees F for the prescribed length of time.
Use 14 hours for small curd cottage cheese, or 5 hours for large curd.
After the curds have been properly formed it is time to
allow the cottage cheese to be separated from the whey. This is accomplished by allowing the whey to
drain away from the curds by suspending the mixture in a cloth bag that is used
as a filter. You can place the cloth bag
into a colander over a pot for this process or hang it up over a pot to collect
the whey.
In the small curd process the curds should be washed briefly
in cold water to remove the acid from the cheese. Place the cheese in clean containers that
have been sterilized for storage in your refrigerator. You can use plastic containers for this
purpose.
References:
Homemade Cottage Cheese, Harold J. Bassett, http://extension.missouri.edu/publications/DisplayPub.aspx?P=G9550
Cottage Cheese, Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottage_cheese
No comments:
Post a Comment