Homemade cottage cheese

I decided to try my hand at making cottage cheese from scratch using the recipe in Barbara M. Walker's Little House Cookbook. It was definitely a learning experience and my finished product is NOT perfect, but I had a good time for my first adventure with milk and cultures! 

The first step, violating all food safety procedures, is to mix 1 gallon pasteurized skim (nonfat) milk with 1/2 cup cultured buttermilk and let it sit, covered, at room temperature. [I made a half recipe.] In a day or two, the milk mixture smells slightly sour and has "clabbered," resembling pudding. 

If I were using raw milk, the buttermilk would be unnecessary. Pasteurization removes the cheesemaking bacteria, so we have to add cultures back in for curds to form. 

A random post-it note reminded family members that the milk was intentionally left on the counter, not forgotten before it made it to the fridge.

 After almost exactly a day, the milk mixture was the consistency of thick yogurt.

 The next step was to heat the mixture very gradually over a double boiler-type arrangement. Supposedly, in about an hour, puddinglike curds would form with whey rising above it.

 The recipe said that the water underneath should not boil and the milk should not be stirred.

 Sure enough, in a little over an hour, the milk had sort of separated. At this point, I thought it was ready for the next step, straining. In this step, the when is poured into a smaller bowl, and then the curds are drained through several layers of cheesecloth and a colander.

In theory, the curds stay inside the cheesecloth and the cheesemaker is able to squeeze out any remaining whey, leaving behind the finished cottage cheese. But in reality, I must have messed something up, because mine went straight through the cheesecloth. Maybe I wasn't using enough layers of cheesecloth, or maybe something went wrong in the preparation process.

 After I failed that round of straining, I dumped the whole mess back into the bowl and put it onto the heat again. I suppose you could say the mixture got stirred, contrary to the recipe, but once it began heating, it started to separate again. In the end, I was able to re-strain it using twice as many layers of cheesecloth as before, and it turned out looking sort of like cottage cheese.

 Here's the bowl of whey after all was said and done.

 I don't think cheesecloth is a multi-use product.

 And for all my half-gallon of skim milk, only about a cup of cottage cheese was produced, although the recipe indicated I should have been able to make six balls the size of an orange. Maybe that's another effect of messing up like I did? Who knows.

 This is small-curd cottage cheese, as opposed to the large-curd variety which must be made using rennet and a special curd-cutting procedure. The small-curd cottage cheese I ended up with actually seems a lot like ricotta cheese. I'll have to research how ricotta is made and what the difference is.

The recipe is for cottage cheese balls with onions, like the ones Ma made in Little Town on the Prairie chapter 10 "Mary Goes to College." Therefore, the final step is to mix in a few tablespoons of heavy cream to hold the curds together, plus some chopped green onions and salt to taste. I declined to form the final mixture into balls for serving, so here's a photo of the final mixture.

It must be obvious that I am not a cheesemaking expert. Like I said, this was an adventure for me. If you decide to try your hand at making cottage cheese, or, better yet, hard cheese, may you have better luck than I did!

Until next time, happy reading!
Elizabeth