Does anyone make their own cottage cheese?

[Houseplanter]

I love cottage cheese and wondered if anyone made it in smallish quantities that could share how they do it.

Online recipes seem to talk about massive quantities

My mother used to make it as a child, with her mum, to use up the milk.I'm going to ask her about it and get back to you.( She's a good cook maker of food so probably will know.)

@shortoedtreecreeper thankyou so much..

I have this recipe from a cheese making kit - I haven’t tried this one, but their other cheese recipes work well.

We made it at school (about 40 years ago) I remember it being fairly simple to do!! 🤣

housewifehowtos.com/cook/how-to-make-homemade-cottage-cheese/

@NoOneKnowsWhoYouAre I was going to try that recipe earlier today but I don't want a gallon and dividing the lemon juice blows my mind 😂

So back then ,late 1940's 50s non homoginised milk left to go sour in the bottle.
Then put in muslin overnight, the whey ran out, you got cheese in the morning that you could salt.

240ml is a cup so half the recipes lemon juice would be 110ml to half a gallon of milk

Ignore me it would be 55ml!!!🤣

Jumping on this to know if anyone knows how to make curd cheese, I simply cant buy it down here and want to make curd tarts
Or if anyone knows what to look for in turkish or greek shops as I noticed today they had a lot of curdy looking jars of cheese.

I think you could have fun trying out lots of different types of.cottage cheese curd cheese adding cream etc.I want to give it a go now.

So the online link would be

4.5L milk to 120ml lemon juice

So 1L milk to 27ml lemon juice

Or 1pint of milk to 15ml (1tbsp) lemon juice.

I was about to say I think it's about 13ml per pint..

I'm tempted to have a go...

Well if all you waste is a pint of milk and a table spoon of lemon juice there's no great cost so it wouldn't matter too much if the experiment failed?

Unlike if it was a gallon of milk...

Yes quite. Even if it worked I don't think I could get through a gallon..

I just have no idea how much cheese it will actually produce? I just don't have scale for it? I feel like there will be quite a lot of whey compared to the curds so I wonder if it might not produce that much but I don't know?

And I wonder if there's anything you can do with the whey - obviously now commercial places make protein powder and stuff but that's not very viable at home.

Google tells me to use it in soup (I make a lot) or smoothies, or use in bread and baking. Apparently it also freezes so there would be no need to waste it

Yes you can freeze dairy really well, butter, cream, cheese, ricotta, mascarpone, not sure about yoghurt but I would give it a go.

Have you seen that in the online recipe you can change the number of servings and it will calculate the amounts of ingredients you need? So change the 6 half-cup servings to 1 or 2. (You can also put it into metric units)

Also, the recipe SabrinaThwaite posted makes 250g cheese from 2 litres of milk so hopefully that will give you more of an idea how much to expect.

In my local Asda there's a Polish food section that has curd cheese - the package has English labelling as well as Polish. You could try a Polish shop if you've got one local to you.

If you're still around OP, I found your thread when googling to see if there was a reason why I can't get cottage cheese at the moment (I sometimes eat a pot of Longley Farm, the best kind that I've eaten for years) for breakfast.

Predictably it's the latest TikTok craze so I might have a go at making my own as I bought a cheese making kit from Amazon a couple of years ago and I'm on a bit of a 'use up' mission at the moment. It it was only £8 and it's well worth the money, you get a thermometer, rennet, citric acid, cheesecloth, mould and himalayan salt.

I haven't made cottage cheese yet, but have made a soft ricotta style cheese and mozarella and I was all set to use the quantities in the instructions specified, ie a gallon or two large bottles of milk but I'd poured one into my biggest pan and it was nearly full, so I did a half batch and it still made quite a lot of ricotta (but it also took ages and wasn't as nice as the cheap stuff you get in Aldi so I won't bother with that again).

The mozzarella made about what you get in two standard supermarket balls from 4 pints of milk and that was much quicker and pretty good, so I'd do that again.

I'm now going to have a go at making cottage cheese seeing as I can't seem to buy it right now and hopefully it will be as creamy as Longley Farm.

I recently heard in a podcast about protein products that there's quite a lot of protein in the whey (as it's a byproduct of the cheese making industry that's used to make whey powder on an industrial scale) and they said that it can be used in smoothies and recovery drinks.