How to make cottage cheese at home?
Homemade cottage cheese is much healthier than store-bought cottage cheese. The true composition of the latter often remains a mystery to the consumer. Why feed your children something unclear when you can give your child delicious homemade cottage cheese, the ingredients of which you are sure of. Don't know how to make cottage cheese yourself at home? Even a novice housewife can do this, it’s nothing complicated, but as a result you will not only get a healthy product, but also take care of the health of your family.
There are a lot of recipes for making cottage cheese at home. You just have to choose the one that suits you the most, there is a classic, grandma’s version, or you can make it in a slow cooker. Only proven recipes and excellent results.
Grandmothers used this recipe to make cottage cheese at home, and it will remain relevant for a long time. All you need to prepare is milk good quality, ideally rustic. If you can’t buy a farm product, use one that has a shelf life of several days.
Ingredients:
Milk – 3 l
Preparation: 
The preparation process for this recipe takes several days. Place the can of milk in a warm place until it turns into curdled milk. If the room is warm, 2 days will be enough; if it is cooler, the process will take 3-4 days.
If you have country milk, cream will form on the surface. They can be removed or left, then the fat content of the cottage cheese will be higher. Curdled milk from natural milk is obtained as a single mass, whereas when using store-bought milk, the curdled milk is collected on top, and whey remains at the bottom.
Carefully pour the curdled milk into a saucepan and place on the stove, turn the heat to low, stir occasionally. After 15-20 minutes, the whey will begin to actively separate.
Prepare a colander in advance, place it on the pan and cover it with gauze. Pour the contents of the pan into a colander, tie a gauze and let the liquid drain well. The cottage cheese is ready.
If you like more moist cottage cheese, leave it in gauze for 3-4 hours; you need it dry, “forget” about it all night. Whey is great for making pancakes, pancakes or bread.
This cottage cheese can be given to a child without fear, and if you are going to introduce it into complementary foods for an infant, do not make the cottage cheese too fatty. It will turn out great too.
The following recipe is very interesting and simple, and you will learn how to make cottage cheese from kefir.
Here, in general, no effort is required to prepare it. The recipe is simple and easy. All you need to do is buy a package of kefir (in soft packaging) and put it in the freezer overnight.
Next, remove the kefir from the freezer, cut and discard the packaging and transfer the kefir to a colander lined with gauze. Don't forget to place a pan under it. The kefir has melted and everything is ready. There is no need to press anything. It turns out very tasty and tender cottage cheese. If you add fruit and give it to your child, he will not distinguish it from store-bought cottage cheese.
Such cottage cheese cannot be subjected to heat treatment! It is very moist and tender, so do not use it for cheesecakes and casseroles. It is best to simply eat it for dessert, adding honey or fresh berries, or use to make cream.
Cottage cheese according to this recipe is prepared much faster than the classic one, but in addition to milk, you will need a special vivo starter.
If you use country milk, you must first boil it and heat it to a temperature of 40 C. Pasteurized milk can simply be heated to the required temperature. 
Ingredients:
Milk – 2.5 -3 l
Vivo starter – 1 pc.
Preparation:
Prepare milk depending on what kind of milk you have: store-bought or natural farm milk. Take one bottle of starter, pour a little milk into it and shake. Add the starter to the warm milk and mix well. Cover the pan with a lid and set aside for 6-8 hours.
During this time, the milk will turn into curdled milk. Place a saucepan with milk on the stove over medium heat, stirring occasionally, for 20 minutes. You will see for yourself how the whey begins to separate from the curd mass. Remove from heat and cool until room temperature.
Place the mixture in a colander and leave for a while to drain the whey. The cottage cheese turns out very tender and tasty.
If you have a slow cooker, the following recipe is for you.
Making cottage cheese according to this recipe is easy and requires no special effort.
Important! Cottage cheese is prepared using sour cream, so you will need a natural product. Read the ingredients carefully; proper sour cream is prepared only from cream; there should be no vegetable fats. If you take low-quality sour cream, you will only ruin all the products.
Ingredients:
Milk – 2 l
Sour cream – 100 gr.
Preparation:
Pour warm milk into the multicooker bowl, add sour cream and mix well. Turn on the Yogurt program for 7 hours. If your multicooker does not have such a function, the Multicook program will also work. Set the temperature to 38°C, time to 7 hours.
After the specified time has passed, stir the milk, turn on the “Multi-cook” program for 40 minutes, t - 95° C.
Drain the cottage cheese in a colander in the usual way. The longer the whey drains from it, the drier it will be. If you don't know how long you will need, try the cottage cheese periodically. Usually it takes from 1 to 12 hours. It all depends on what you prefer: slightly moist or drier. It is not afraid of heat treatment, so it makes excellent baked goods. Mix with berries and a tasty and healthy treat for your child is ready. An excellent recipe - making cottage cheese is very simple, and besides, you don’t need constant control.
Very quick way
- preparing healthy cottage cheese at home. Use any milk, it doesn’t matter in this recipe. Cottage cheese prepared according to this recipe turns out very tasty, but it is better not to use it for baking. Make light and airy desserts from it.
Ingredients:
Milk – 1 l
Juice of half a lemon
Preparation:
Before you start cooking, squeeze the juice out of the lemon. Place the pan with milk on the stove. Heat it well over low heat. As soon as signs of boiling appear, add lemon juice, stir and remove the pan from the heat. You will see the milk instantly curdle and the whey is separated immediately.
Place the mixture in a colander and allow the whey to drain. Literally after 30 minutes you can eat the cottage cheese. This express recipe will come in handy when you want cottage cheese here and now. Despite the fact that it is prepared literally in a matter of minutes, this does not affect the taste in any way.
No less delicious cottage cheese can be made according to the following recipe.
Another quick recipe. To prepare it, the cheapest milk and the same cheap kefir in soft packages are suitable. It is prepared quickly and simply by analogy with the previous recipe.
Ingredients:
Milk – 2 l
Kefir – 1 l
Preparation:
Pour milk into a saucepan and place on the stove over low heat. There is no need to boil the milk; as soon as you see it starts to boil, pour in the kefir. Stir and remove the pan from the heat.
When the milk has cooled to room temperature, drain in a colander. Give time for the serum to drain. After about an hour, the cottage cheese is ready and can be eaten. If you plan to make cheesecakes from it, leave it in a colander a little longer for about two hours.
The next option for making cottage cheese at home is not exactly a recipe, but the result is excellent.
This is not a recipe, but rather a food rescue. Let’s say you forgot about milk or bought a lot and didn’t have time to use it, and it turned sour. Why throw it away when you can make delicious and healthy cottage cheese. After all, in essence, the milk for cottage cheese should curdle and sour, as with the classic recipe, but here almost everything is ready. There's just a little bit of effort left.
Ingredients:
Milk. How much. Of course, the more there is, the better.
Preparation: 
Pour the sour milk into a saucepan and place on the stove. Make the fire low, do not forget to stir periodically. As soon as the milk begins to warm up, the whey will immediately begin to separate. It will be enough to keep it on the stove for 15-20 minutes. There is no need to bring it to a boil.
Remove the pan from the stove, place in a colander, and allow the whey to drain.
The taste of the cottage cheese will depend on how long you have left the sour milk. If you feel that there is sourness in the finished product, it is better not to give it to your child, but to use it for baking. This cottage cheese tolerates heat treatment very well.
Helpful Tips:
do not heat milk in enamel pan, it may burn and the taste of the cottage cheese will deteriorate;
To get an excellent result, choose natural village milk; if this is not possible, buy one with a short shelf life;
Whatever recipe you choose, do not boil the milk, otherwise the cottage cheese will turn out hard and tasteless.
How to make homemade cheese
The most delicious cottage cheese is obtained only from homemade milk with good fat content. It is very easy to independently regulate the level of humidity, friability, and softness of the cottage cheese, depending on personal preferences. In addition, you can be completely confident in its high quality. A by-product of production will be whey, which in itself is very beneficial for the body, 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 curdled milk 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 you need to perform one or two simple manipulations, the rest will be done by lactic acid bacteria and time.
To prepare cottage cheese, we will use homemade fresh cow's milk of good quality, without any impurities or additives. If you are unable 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 have a high fat content of 3.2%;
Milk should not contain preservatives or antibiotics; very often they are contained in milk with an extended shelf life.
Taste Info Dairy desserts
Stage 1: Working with milk
First you need to evaluate the quality of the milk. If a layer of cream is clearly visible on the surface of the milk in a can or bottle, then the yield of cottage cheese will be greater. 
Such milk must be poured into glass, clay or ceramic containers, where the souring process will take place. 
Metal containers are not suitable! Place the jar of milk in a dark place for about two days, preferably closer to a heat source, for example, in a cabinet next to a working refrigerator or stove. In the refrigerator itself, the milk will not sour, but will only spoil! After a couple of days, you need to check the container, in which you can no longer see milk, but good country yogurt.
If you put milk to sour in an open sunny place, it can turn sour very quickly, you need to carefully monitor it, since milk peroxidizes very quickly in the sun. 
Properly sour milk turns into a dense, thick mass that separates from the whey. This moment needs to be controlled, because Less acidified milk will produce less cottage cheese, and peroxidized milk will produce cottage cheese that is not as tasty; it will be more sour. 
To make milk sour faster, you can add:
a piece of black bread;
a spoonful of sour cream or kefir;
lemon juice or citric acid.
Stage 2: Working with curdled milk
The curdled milk needs to be heated in a saucepan over low heat; I cook the cottage cheese on an electric stove and use the lowest heat possible. Can be heated in a water bath, i.e. in one pan bigger size Place a smaller saucepan with curdled milk.
In order to make cottage cheese, sour milk must be heated, and not brought to a boil, i.e. the temperature should be approximately 40 degrees. 
During the cooking process, the easiest way to check the heating of the product is with your finger. If you feel a pleasant warmth and not a burning temperature, then everything is fine. The process lasts about 15-20 minutes. The longer the yogurt is heated, the harder the curd will be. It is advisable to constantly stir the yogurt, or rather, distribute the jelly-like mass throughout the entire volume of the product. 
Large parts of sour milk will heat up less well, and cooking will be uneven.
Teaser network
I don’t know about you, but in our supermarkets it has become quite problematic to buy real cottage cheese; they mainly sell cottage cheese products. Even if it is written that it is cottage cheese, one wonders whether it is good... Since this is a fairly popular product in our family, I wondered how to make cottage cheese at home.
I recently talked about this useful product and him beneficial influence on our body, if you missed it, read it. And, of course, our body will only benefit from good cottage cheese.
There were quite a few ways to prepare homemade cottage cheese, I have already tried a couple of recipes, so I will share my experience and tell you about other methods so that you can choose the one you like best.
No matter how you make homemade cottage cheese, there is general tips, which are better to take into account in order to do everything correctly, and the cottage cheese turns out tasty and tender.
I hope the tips didn’t scare you and you still try to make cottage cheese at home. Choose the best recipe and go ahead.
I tried this recipe first because some of the milk I bought had turned sour. At first I wanted to use it in baking - it turns out good with sour milk, but then I remembered that I wanted to try making cottage cheese from yogurt. I had farm milk and I knew for sure that it would make high-quality yogurt.
Store-bought milk does not always naturally ferment as it should.
Ingredients:
Homemade cottage cheese recipe from milk:
Homemade cottage cheese made from milk, or rather from yogurt, turned out delicious, but I didn’t really like waiting a day or more, so I decided to find another recipe. Although for faster fermentation it is recommended to put sour cream (1 tbsp per liter of milk) or a piece of stale rye bread into the milk, and there are also ready-made starters that are sold at the pharmacy. In this case, the milk may become curdled overnight. But you still have to wait. I found a quicker recipe and really liked it.
I will offer you two recipes instant cooking cottage cheese - from milk and kefir, and also from milk and lemon. Both farm milk and store-bought milk are suitable for making cottage cheese using these methods. But I can only say about the taste of the cottage cheese about the recipe with kefir - tender and tasty, and I used store-bought milk. I haven't tried it with lemon yet.
Ingredients:
How to make cottage cheese from milk and kefir:
Since in this recipe the milk is brought to a boil, cottage cheese prepared in this way can be given to children and even infants.
Ingredients:
Recipe for cottage cheese made from milk and lemon:
Of course, cottage cheese already contains calcium, but some categories of people require increased content calcium - for children, pregnant women, nursing mothers, elderly people, people suffering from atherosclerosis, anemia, kidney and liver diseases.
To replenish calcium in the body, you can include calcined cottage cheese in your diet, but not more often than 2 - 3 times a week. Such healthy cottage cheese can be prepared at home by adding calcium chloride, which is sold in pharmacies.
Ingredients:
Homemade calcined cottage cheese recipe
Calcium chloride can be replaced with calcium lactate in tablets, which can also be purchased in pharmacies. The recipe is as follows: 8 - 10 tablets per 1 liter of milk. Grind the tablets into powder and add to milk, brought to a boil. Mix well, once the milk has curdled, strain it.
Our supermarkets sell cottage cheese, which is very popular among customers - it is a tender and tasty grain cottage cheese and it can also be made at home.
Ingredients:
Recipe for cottage cheese with lemon juice:
Another interesting recipe cottage cheese without heat treatment - you can use kefir or yogurt.
As you know, cottage cheese is usually made from milk. But using my recipe, there is no need to wait for the milk to sour naturally, and the cottage cheese itself will be more tasty and not sour. And most importantly, you can prepare such cottage cheese at home simply and quickly. And so, we master the recipe for making homemade cottage cheese from fresh (often said sweet), not sour milk. Step-by-step photos will help you more accurately understand what is happening and how.
Ingredients for cottage cheese:
Milk (fresh) – 3 liters;
Citric acid – 1 tbsp. lie (or juice of one medium lemon).
When starting to cook, I usually immediately prepare a sieve into which we will discard the cottage cheese and a piece of clean gauze folded in two layers. The size of the gauze should be such that it can completely cover the sieve.
The next thing to do is pour the milk into a stainless steel or aluminum pan and place it on the stove with high heat.
We need to heat the milk almost to a boil. During the heating process, I usually stir the milk with a slotted spoon to prevent foam from forming.
As soon as the milk reaches a boil (you can tell by tasting the milk with your finger, it must be very hot), we need to turn the heat to minimum, add citric acid or squeezed lemon juice to the milk and stir with a slotted spoon.
After adding acid, you will see how, almost immediately, the milk will curdle and curd flakes will form on its surface. The gas under the pan must be turned off.
The cottage cheese is heated, now we need to place a sieve on an empty pan and strain the cottage cheese.
The whey drains into the pan, and grains of cottage cheese remain on the gauze. Let's wait until all the liquid has drained and pour it into the bottle.
The ends of the gauze with the still wet cottage cheese need to be wrapped (the cottage cheese comes out as if in a gauze bag). So that the cottage cheese is not so wet, we place a flat plate on top of the gauze bundle, on which we place a load. For this purpose, I used a bottle of serum. The design is clearly visible in the photo.
After an hour, we remove the oppression and take out healthy, fresh and tasty homemade cottage cheese from the gauze. Look, you can even see in the photo that the cottage cheese turned out delicious.
This cottage cheese can simply be served with sugar, sour cream or jam. Also, it is perfect for cheesecakes or can be an excellent filling for baked goods or dumplings.
Making cottage cheese from milk at home is a completely simple process. And the resulting product will be both healthier and tastier than cottage cheese purchased at the market or in a supermarket.
3 liters of milk poured into a glass jar;
- pot;
- colander;
- gauze.
To make good cottage cheese, it is best to use natural homemade or farm milk. The pasteurized store-bought product probably won't work. The quality and purity of milk should not cause you any doubts, because milk cannot be boiled - good cottage cheese does not tolerate high temperatures.
A jar of fresh milk does not need to be placed in the refrigerator, it should be in a warm place. After 2-3 days, the milk should turn into curdled milk. When the curdled milk is ready, you will be able to see vertical “movements”. They are formed by bubbles carbon dioxide, rising up. Ready yogurt resembles jelly, easily separating from the walls of the jar. It is extremely important to ensure that the milk does not acidify, otherwise the cottage cheese will turn out very sour.
If the milk was of high quality, then enough a large number of cream that needs to be skimmed. The more of them left, the fattier the cottage cheese will be. This is how you can achieve the desired fat content of the final product.
The jar of curdled milk must be placed in a saucepan, which is set on fire (very low) and on the bottom of which a thick cloth folded in several layers has been previously placed. You need to pour water into the pan so that it reaches the middle of the jar.
To warm up the curdled milk better, you should take a knife with a long blade and cut it crosswise. The jar must be covered with a small piece of gauze. The curdled milk should be in the pan until the water begins to boil, but under no circumstances boil. This process will take approximately an hour. After this, you must turn off the fire and leave the jar of yogurt, from which the whey has already separated, in hot water for another 10 minutes.
In the meantime, you need to prepare a bowl into which the whey will be poured, and a colander covered with a fairly large piece of gauze, folded 3-4 times, or thick cotton fabric. The cottage cheese will remain in it. You need to carefully shake out the contents of the jar in order to preserve the integrity of the product as much as possible, because the larger the pieces of curdled milk, the tastier the cottage cheese will be.
Next, the edges of the gauze need to be lifted up, tied and hung over the container into which the whey will drain. You can tie gauze with cottage cheese, for example, to the handle of a retractable kitchen drawer, and place the serum container on a stool under it.
You cannot squeeze the cottage cheese by hand, because the structure of the product may be damaged and it will turn out dry and grainy. The serum should drain on its own. The cottage cheese will be ready when the gauze completely stops dripping.
From 3 liters of milk you can get from 500 to 800 g of cottage cheese. This depends on the fat content of the milk and the moisture content of the final product. Cottage cheese prepared according to this recipe turns out to be quite dense, but not dry, moderately fatty and with a very pleasant, milky, not sour smell.
From this homemade cottage cheese you can make delicious homemade cheesecakes according to our recipe!
