Recipe for Making Homemade Cottage Cheese

Cottage cheese is one of those things that has far more ingredients than it should when you buy it at the store. Homemade cottage cheese is creamy, fluffy, and delicious, and it’s made with only 3 simple ingredients:

organic milk

white vinegar

salt

To compare, here are the ingredients of a common brand of cottage cheese sold at the grocery store:

Cultured Fat Free Milk, Buttermilk, Nonfat Dry Milk, Cream, Salt, Citric Acid, Lactic Acid, Phosphoric Acid, Natural Flavoring, Guar Gum, Mono and Diglycerides, Xanthan Gum, Carob Bean Gum, Titanium, Dioxide(artificial color), Maltodextrin, Cultured dextrose, Potassium Sorbate, Calcium Chloride, Enzymes

If you want to purchase organic cottage cheese, the ingredients will be better but the price will go up dramatically. But make it at home and the price is far lower.  If your milk has just expired, but not turned totally funky, cottage cheese is a good way to use it up.

This recipe is for pasteurized milk from the store. If you are making cottage cheese with raw milk, go here to learn how – the process is different.

Ingredients:

2-1/2 cups of 2% or whole milk

1/4 cup of white vinegar

dash of salt (optional – it’s just for flavor)

Tools:

Large heavy bottomed pot

Instant read thermometer

Flour sack towel  (I use these in the kitchen constantly!)

Directions:

1.)  In a large saucepan bring the milk almost to a boil.   You want it to be a minimum of 185 degrees on an instant read thermometer like this one. (It’s a small investment, but an important one for making homemade organic dairy products.)  As soon as bubbles begin to rise to the top, remove the saucepan from the heat.

2.)  Immediately stir in the white vinegar and the salt (if using).  You will see the milk begin to curdle immediately.

3.)  Allow the mixture to cool completely – about 1 hour at room temperature.

4.)  Line a strainer with a flour sack towel, set it in a large bowl, and separate the curds and the whey  (hints of Little Miss Muffet!) by pouring your curdled milk into the strainer.  Keep the whey for other uses (discussed below).

The result will be a delicious, light and fluffy cottage cheese.  I ended up with just short of 1 cup of cottage cheese and just over a cup and a half of whey.   If your cottage cheese has a bitter taste, rinse the cheese under running water in the lined strainer and let it drain for another hour afterwards.

Some uses for whey:

• Substitute for water or milk in baking


• Use in place of part or all of the water when cooking rice or pasta


• Use it for smoothies


• Use it in oatmeal or other porridge


• Feed it to livestock for some yummy probiotics – dogs and chickens love it


• Make ricotta cheese


• Use it for lacto-fermentation

The post Recipe for Making Homemade Cottage Cheese appeared first on The Sleuth Journal.

How To Make Cottage Cheese And Sour Cream From Raw Milk

Do you have a source of delicious, creamy raw milk? Or, as our grandparents used to call it, milk?

If you do, you probably cringe when you have to go to the store and purchase dairy products from pasteurized milk. Well, cringe no more, because it is unbelievably easy to make your own homemade dairy products, like cottage cheese and sour cream.

And by “unbelievably easy” I mean that you pour milk into a bowl, cover it with a towel, and leave it on the counter for 2 or 3 days.

I couldn’t make this stuff up – it’s that easy. Well, there are a couple of finishing steps to perfect your product, but that’s how you make these things.

If you tried this with store-bought milk, you’d have a disgusting, smelly mess on your hands that you couldn’t choke down without gagging. This highlights the real difference between raw milk and pasteurized. Raw milk is alive, teeming with healthy gut bacteria, while pasteurized milk is dead, and will rot and degrade if not refrigerated. And yet, somehow, farm fresh milk is contraband equivalent to heroin or cocaine in some states.

The sour cream you get from this process is what really got me thinking about raw milk products. Have you ever wondered why there are so many chemicals in the sour cream you get from the store? That’s because it’s not real. Real sour cream is just that, cream that has soured. Because store-bought products must be pasteurized, it is impossible to make real sour cream. You’d just have rotten cream.

Let that sink in for a minute. Very few people in America have actually had sour cream!  They only think they have, but it’s an artificial concoction.

Once you indulge in the richness of the homemade raw milk product, you’ll never want to eat the stuff in the plastic tub again. And when you see how easy it is, you’re going to say, “You’ve got to be kidding!”  Nope. It’s this easy.

If you’re into preparedness, it’s important to note that this is a great, off-grid way to extend the longevity of any raw milk you happen to have in your fridge in the event of a power outage.

IMPORTANT: If you are making cottage cheese from store bought, pasteurized milk, follow the instructions here. If you try to follow this process it won’t work. At all.

Supplies for making raw milk products

Okay, let’s get started. Here’s what you need.

1.) A bowl

2.) A Flour Sack Towel (You’ll use this again later.)

3.) Raw milk

Make sure your bowl is very clean. You don’t want to grow anything funky in there.

You can use raw milk that has begun to taste a bit off for this. I always use whatever I have left when it’s herd share day. There’s no set amount required. If you use a quart of raw milk, you will get about half a cup to a cup of cottage cheese. The amount of sour cream depends upon the amount of cream in your milk. If you’ve been pouring right off the top and not shaking up your raw milk, you won’t get a lot of sour cream. However, if you put some cream aside right away, you’ll get lots of rich goodness from this process.

I like to use flour sack towels for most things in the kitchen because they’re lint-free and versatile. They can be used for anything from hanging cheese to pectin-free jam making to, of course, drying stuff. These are the ones I buy. I always wash them a couple of times before I use them for food making.

Allow the milk to sour on the counter.

I feel like I should be making this seem more complicated than, pour the milk into the bowl and cover it up. But that’s literally ALL YOU DO in this step. I keep my bowl in the laundry room because it’s a few degrees warmer than the kitchen.

Skim the sour cream that rises to the top.

Leave it overnight. On the morning of the second day, taste the creamy goodness on the top, If it is not quite tart enough, leave it to sour for a few more hours. If it’s just how you like it, skim that sour cream off the top and put it in the fridge. Depending on the texture you prefer, you may wish to drain the sour cream using a flour sack towel to thicken it up. (Then make some potatoes so you can eat it all.)

Let the milk separate.

You want to leave it for 2-3 days until it separates completely into something that resembles the contents of the bowl in the photo above. Yuck, right? That, my friends, is a bowl of curds and whey. (I can’t even tell you how much I want to make a Little Miss Muffet joke right now.) I really like to put pretty pictures on my website, but you need to see this so you know that it’s actually supposed to look like that. When it does, you’re ready to move on to the next step.

Drain the whey from the curds.

Use your flour sack towel to line a colander. Place the colander over a bowl  to catch the whey (see below for “wheys” to use it – haha.)

Leave it on the counter to drain for a couple of hours, or until it is the consistency you desire.  Pour the whey you’ve collected into jar and put it in the fridge.

Rinse the curds.

Gather it up in the flour sack towel and put it under the running tap to rinse the whey off of the curds. If you don’t do this, it could have  bitter flavor that some people find unpleasant.  Squeeze the water out. Return it to the colander and let it drain for another hour.

And you have homemade cottage cheese!

 Isn’t that gorgeous?  It won’t have the hard uniform curds of grocery store cottage cheese.  It will be light and fluffy in texture.

What you can do with whey:

• Substitute for water or milk in baking


• Use in place of part or all of the water when cooking rice or pasta


• Use it for smoothies


• Use it in oatmeal or other porridge


• Feed it to livestock for some yummy probiotics – dogs and chickens love it


• Make ricotta cheese


• Use it for lacto-fermentation

Some recommended reading:

The Home Creamery: Make Your Own Fresh Dairy Products; Easy Recipes for Butter, Yogurt, Sour Cream, Creme Fraiche, Cream Cheese, Ricotta, and More! (You have to have this book. If you have access to fresh milk, this will be life-changing!)

Wild Fermentation: The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live-Culture Foods

The Raw Milk Revolution: Behind America’s Emerging Battle over Food Rights

Chemicals Banned in Kids’ Toys Found in Mac and Cheese

Boxed macaroni and cheese is often a favorite food among youngsters, but a recent study suggests the packaged food contains dangerous, endocrine-disrupting chemicals that have been banned in toys: phthalates. [1]

Phthalates are a group of toxic additives in plastics. They’re used to make plastics soft and flexible, and are commonly found in artificial fragrances, inks, coatings, adhesives, and other consumer and industrial products, the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) explains.

These chemicals are approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for use in equipment and materials for food handling, processing, and packaging. Because of this, phthalates often wind up in high-fat, highly-processed foods.

The Coalition for Safer Food Processing & Packaging – which includes the NRDC – recently sent a small sample of mac and cheese and other popular cheese-food items for laboratory testing, and received some unsettling results.

Phthalates were found in 10 varieties of macaroni and cheese, including 8 out of 9 Kraft products. [2]

It’s Time to Remove Phthalates from Food Products

The coalition believes the federal government should step in to regulate and ultimately ban phthalates, but since that is unlikely to happen anytime soon, the onus is on Kraft Heinz to remove phthalates from its food products.

Kraft not only has the largest market for powdered cheese in the industry, but the company has taken action in the past to remove unsafe ingredients from its products (largely due to increasing consumer pressure). For example, in 2016, the company quietly removed artificial dyes from its Mac & Cheese recipe and replaced them with paprika, annatto, and turmeric.

In total, the coalition tested 30 samples – 10 cheese powder, 5 sliced cheese, and 15 natural cheese samples – and 29 of them were found to contain phthalates. Some of the products tested were labeled organic. The highest levels of phthalates were found in the powdered macaroni and cheese samples.

Mike Belliveau, the executive director of the Environmental Health Strategy Center, said:

“The phthalates concentrations in powder from mac and cheese mixes were more than 4 times higher than in block cheese and other natural cheeses like shredded cheese, string cheese, and cottage cheese.” [3]

These chemicals are accidentally making their way into the food system, via processing and packaging. It’s not that Kraft workers are standing over giant vats of powdered cheese, dumping phthalates into them. The key to keeping dangerous substances out of the bellies of hungry kiddos is to ensure safer food processing and packaging methods are in place. [2]

The European Union (EU) has already taken the crucial step of banning phthalates in food contact materials.

Coalition member Peter Lehner said in a statement:

“Parents and their children should not have to wait longer to know that their food does not contain toxic chemicals. We are asking manufacturers to act now.”

No word from Kraft Heinz just yet.

Tom Neltner, the chemicals policy director for the Environmental Defense Fund, said:

“A chemical is not allowed in food unless there is a reasonable certainty it will cause no harm. We don’t think the FDA can say there is a reasonable certainty of no harm.” [3]

Phthalate Dangers

Once you consume phthalates, they can travel through your bloodstream to your organs. Prenatal phthalate exposure is especially concerning, since the chemicals can easily cross from the mother’s body into the placenta. Phthalates can also wind up in breast milk. [1]

Researchers have linked prenatal phthalate exposure to impaired neurological development in children, lower IQ, learning and memory impairment, and antisocial behavior. Boys that are exposed to phthalates in-utero run the risk of genital defects.

In 2008, Congress prohibited the use of DEHP, a chemical known to negatively affect the development of the testicles and the production of normal sperm in young animals, in toys and childcare products. It is considered a “gender-bending” chemical because it can cause males of all species to adopt more female traits.

In 2015, the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) proposed a ban on several additional phthalates used in toys and other children’s products, but the proposal has yet to be finalized.

A report released in late 2015 showed that more than 81% of 164 dollar-store products tested contained concerning levels of at least 1 toxic chemical. Everything from toys to jewelry, to personal care products contained chemicals that were carcinogenic, or otherwise hazardous.

Sources:

[1] Natural Resources Defense Council

[2] New York Daily News

[3] Popsugar

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About Julie Fidler:
	Julie Fidler is a freelance writer, legal blogger, and the author of Adventures in Holy Matrimony: For Better or the Absolute Worst. She lives in Pennsylvania with her husband and two ridiculously spoiled cats. She occasionally pontificates on her blog.