I Made Cottage Cheese!

I believe there is some value in making your own healthy food, whether that means growing your own vegetables in the garden or raising your own chickens for eggs or baking a pie from scratch.   These were skills our ancestors had and that we have often forgotten. 

So, when I saw the recipe for cottage cheese on the Mother Earth News website, I said “I have to try this”!  Making your own cottage cheese allows you to control some ingredients that you can’t control in store-bought foods. For example, I need to keep a low sodium diet.  Store bought cottage cheese is very high in sodium. So I can make my own low sodium version.  Is cottage cheese healthy or fattening? It is healthy!  If you want a low fat cottage cheese you can start with skim or low fat milk. 

Why do people eat cottage cheese? It is an excellent source of calcium as well as a protein packed supper food.  A half cup serving has about 14 grams of protein.  It is a good post work-out snack.

It’s not hard to make cottage cheese.  The hardest part is finding the rennet which is needed to coagulate the milk.  The rennet can be a “vegetable” rennet or animal based rennet. It comes in tablet or liquid form. You might find it at Whole Foods or some other market.   I ordered mine from Amazon but I saw it online at Walmart as well. (You can use vinegar or lemon juice in place of the rennet to make cottage cheese but the recipe is a bit different.  See end of this blog for a link).

I used a quarter of one tablet rennet to make my cottage cheese. (This packet of rennet will last a long time). Rennet is a complex set of enzymes produced in the stomachs of ruminant mammals, mainly found in the lining of the fourth stomach of young goats, calves, and lambs.  It coagulates the casein in milk.

And then of course you will need a gallon of milk.  Look for organic cow’s milk that is low temperature pasteurized. I used whole milk purchased from my Natural Grocers store, but it might work with low-fat milk as well. Just don’t use an ultra-high temperature pasteurized (called UHT) milk.  And don’t use canned, evaporated, or powdered milk.  All of these have been overly processed and the proteins have been denatured (ruined, in my estimation).

Or better yet, use raw milk which is not pasteurized. Since I was testing this recipe for the first time and did not want to risk failure, I did not use my raw milk in case something went wrong. If you start with the healthiest milk, you will get the healthiest cottage cheese.

To make the cottage cheese (full instructions below in a link), you gently heat up the milk in a large pot.  Then you add some buttermilk or kefir to acidify the mixture.  Then you add the rennet.  You let it sit for 15 minutes and it will “set-up” and start to look like a pot of yogurt.  You then “slice up” the large mass by drawing a knife through it in multiple directions.  Then you stir and heat it until the white curds are cooked down and the whey (clear liquid) has separated.  You drain off the whey and you are left with the “curds”, or cottage cheese. 

If you were living on a farm a hundred years ago, you would feed the whey to the pigs out back. If you were little Miss Muffet, you would be sitting on your tuffet eating your curds and whey (and watching out for that scary spider).

Making your own cottage cheese is not scary and gives you more control over the quality of your food. What type of cottage cheese healthiest? It is the kind you make yourself and hopefully with organic ingredients. Is there a downside to cottage cheese?  It can be high in sodium but you can make it low sodium.  Is it fat-free?  It can be, if you start with low-fat milk. 

The full recipe, is here. The recipe that uses vinegar is here (I did not test this one).   Your cottage cheese can be eaten as-is, or you can use it in lasagna or a casserole. Do you want to know how to make it taste even better?  You can add honey, maple syrup, chopped fruit or nuts to the finished product.  You can add a spoonful of jam.  You can make it savory with bacon bits and chives. Enjoy!

Always talk to your health professional before starting anything new.  This information is not intended to diagnose, treat or cure any condition and is intended only for entertainment. I welcome your comments