Congratulations for conquering your nemesis, Gavin. Just wondering about the cream added before serving, as to what percentage the butterfat was? In Canada we would typically have a choice of 10% ("half-and-half"), 18% ("coffee cream" or "table cream"), and 36% ("whipping cream").
Like a lot of simple cheese, cottage cheese can be quite deep. In case you are interested, there's a bit of a trick for achieving great texture in large curd cottage cheese. This style of cheese (and a couple of others) is built around the difference in the way milk curdles due to rennet and the way it curdles due to acid. When milk curdles due to rennet, the the chymosin enzyme cuts away the kappa-casein from the outside of the casein protein bundles (called micelles). This allows it to bind to dissolved calcium and build up a matrix of casein micelles glued together with calcium. When milk curdles due to acid, it reduces the overall charge on the micelles to zero. Ordinarily the micelles have a charge, which keeps them all separated from each other and sticking close to the water molecules. As the pH goes down, they lose that affinity for water and also lose the repulsion they have with each other. The result is that they will mechanically stick together kind of like sand particles in a sand castle. They also push the water out from between each micelle. The trick for great cottage cheese is to form the curds with rennet and then acidify the curds until it hits the point at which it actively pushes water out (the point at which curds would form due to acid). The pH where this happens depends on the temperature. At room temperature it's about 4.7 and at 50 C it's at a pH of 5.1 or 5.2 (I always forget exactly what pH this happens at at different temperatures and it's hard to find a good graph of it -- if you have a pH meter you can measure it yourself by heating milk to 50 C, then adding enough acid to form curds. Then measure the pH). This is the trick for large curd cottage cheese (and a few other cheeses). You want to form that curd and then you want to slowly heat the the curd, acidifying it and finally hitting the right acidity and texture depending on the final temperature you are choosing. You could potentially go as high as 55 C, which would give you the right texture at a final pH of about 5.3, or go to about 45 C which will give you the correct texture at a lower pH (down about 5.0). It just depends on how you like your cheese. There are a couple of things to keep in mind, though. First, I think it's generally a mistake to use only a mesophilic culture for large curd cottage cheese. You want to use a farmhouse culture that include a thermophilic component. Something like MA4000 would be perfect, but you can also mix a mesophilic culture and a thermophilic culture. The reason for using that kind of culture is probably obvious at this point: you need to keep lowering the pH as you are increasing the temp. Whether you *need* it or not really depends on the mesophilic culture and the speed that you are increasing the temp. Some cultures will survive quite a long time at higher temps. Also if you spend significant time (a couple of hours) below 40 C, you'll be getting down to the right pH. However with a thermophilic culture, it will be speeding up as it's heating up and that will help you a lot. Obviously you want significant acidification at low temps, though, because you want those buttery notes from the mesophilic culture. It's an art. It's also important not to stir too much. It takes quite a long time to get to the right pH to hit the best texture for cottage cheese. If you stir, you'll have very small curds. You just want to keep them from matting. So just an occasional single stir every 5 minutes or so is fine. Finally, the question is when to stop. You can use a pH meter to help you, but the old school traditional way is to wait until you can take curd out of the vat and literally bounce it on the counter. You just toss it down and it should bounce up and inch or two rather than splatting on the counter. This means that you've hit the right pH because it's the only time that the water will get forced out of the curd enough to give you that texture. I hope you found that interesting. I love these fresh cheeses because they are often incredibly deep with near infinite ways to improve.
You can tell when someone knows what they're talking about, as I can here. I usually use meso aroma B, but I may try MA4002 next time based on this! As per Margaret Peters' self-published "The Cheesemaker's Manual", I have been using 1.25ml single-strength rennet and letting it coagulate and ripen simultaneously at my room temp of about 75⁰F for 6 hours and then cut and go into cooking the curd. I find it works pretty well. She does call for raising the temp by 5⁰F every 5 minutes until 113⁰F, but I'm wondering now if slowing that down to maybe raising every 10 minutes would be beneficial for the further pH decrease with the thermophile added. I suppose I'd have to play around with the cook timing. I wonder if a combination of meso aroma B and something like STH or TM81 would be even better than the MA4002.
I do love the fact that you have mastered so many complex cheeses, and had success with experiments like your Vegemite cheese, yet success at the relatively simple cottage cheese has (until now) eluded you. Well done, it looked great.
This is really fascinating! Most of the cottage cheese recipes I've seen just use high heat with vinegar or lemon juice. I don't think I've ever seen it done with cultures and rennet before.
I just came in the house to cool off and sit down for a minute after adjusting the fences all morning in the goat pen in preparation for fall breeding season and to separate kids from does so I can get a bit more milk for cheese making. It's sweltering out there and your short video was a great reminder for me why I do all this work. Thanks for the entertainment, the recipe and the inspiration. Now, back out in the sun to finish... Have a good day!
We make cottage cheese with our buttermilk or clabber and rennet - always turns out great! To make it creamy and tangy, we “dress it” by adding in buttermilk after that chill in the fridge.
I finished making the cottage cheese and now I refrigerate it. It tastes awesome. It will go very well with sugar and cinnamon and in crepes. Thank you so very much. 😅
Thats the cream on top of the cream. We used to get fresh milk from a farmer and it was in one of them big glass jars like they put picked eggs or pig feet in and that cream would actually separate into three layers. milk in th elowerst the lighter cream in the middle and the heavy cream on top. The lighter cream in the middle was perfect for coffee and the heaviest perfect for whipping.
I made this yesterday. I will add the cream today. I can’t say if it will be better than HP Hood but I am confident that it will be delicious in blintzes and crepes as a filler. 😅
Thank you that cottage cheese looks wonderful. I made cottage cheese with some 4% milk, that I didn’t want to go bad. It was only a half a gallon, and I didn’t have any cultures to put in it. I just used lemon juice to bring the curds up… and I didn’t have any cream to dress it, so I used plain whole milk, Greek yogurt… it was absolutely delicious. I ate it with mung bean salad, and it was just delicious a perfect pair for any savory foods.
Your channel is really inspiring. Got a hold of a second hand wine fridge which can perfectly function as a cheese fridge given its temp range and am aging a Stilton Blue in there as we speak.
sounds tasty, so i'll give this a go tomorrow as i've been looking for a diff cheese to make. a little stir-intensive but that's the process to make great cheese
Nice on tackling this!! I've always dried mine out for sevrral hours before adding cream. But the refrigerator method seems to have replaced this step. Going to try your method!! ❤ 🧀
Hi Gavin, so glad to see to you beat this cheese, funny I always thought that it would have been one of the easier cheeses to make !! go figure . cheers 👍👍👍👍😁😁
Just saw, from 4 days ago Country Life Vlog, them makimg cottage cheese from milk set with yoghurt. Thought it was bs, so came to Gavin. And both recipes I've watched so far have followed the same methods otjer than setting culture
So excited to try this as I’ve not been able to master a good cottage cheese yet. Question: I’m wondering why mesophilic culture when you heat the curds to a pretty high temp. Is that not too high for mesophilic cultures?
The Meso is to help acidify the milk and get a better curd set with the rennet. As it is a fresh cheese, it doesn't matter. The curds are cooked to that high temp so it is firm on the outside and moist on the inside.
congrats on finally getting this done. probably a bit high in fat for chat I needed cottage cheese for (I found a brand that uses no gum/emulsifiers though) which is cottage cheese bread which is just cottage cheese egg white powder and water.
With smartphones or touch tablets, be sure to give them a vinegar wipe every now and again, especially if you're going between that surface, and curd stirring. We're already bringing milk to an unsafe temperature, adding extra bacteria and keeping that primordial stew at that temp or higher for extended times: there's no need to add something extra to the mix.
That was so pleasant to watch , the process was so engaging. But as per my knowledge, people in South Asian countries especially India and Pakistan have a dish called Paneer , which is just a by product of adding vinegar or lime solution to milk to seperate the milk solids. I'm wondering if that's cottage cheese as well ??
The cottage cheese that I used to be able to purchase in the grocery store must be close to 20% cream. I see what my cottage cheese is like and it’s great. I suspect that store bought is curd mixed into cream rather than cream mixed into curd.
I would love to try to make cottage cheese some day, it looks to be pretty simple. I like cottage cheese, but the stuff you buy in the grocery store isn't very flavorful.
I absolutely adore cottage cheese! I haven't watched the video yet, and I'm hoping this will be simple enough to give me a reason to not buy store made.
Good morning Gavin, I'm excited in trying the your recipe of cottage cheese, I bought myself a sous vide and i want to use it to make cheese. But how do you use it to raise the temperature of the curds over a period of 90 minutes? Do I enter the temperature of 46 C / 114.8 F right away?
You finally defeated the enemy! 👍 Not my cup of tea but I sure bet my Daddy would have went to town and chowed down on that with a vengence🤣. He loved cottage cheese🥰. I'm watching you and wondering to myself why you are wearing a flannel shirt and gloves. Then it dawned on me that it's winter "down thar" in upsidedownland, Doh!!!
My 'nemesis cheese' (I love that phrase!) is Mozz. I bought a Ph meter, followed yours and other recipes/techniques, and still, no love from Mozz. I'm glad you conquered your nemesis.... perhaps one day I shall do the like.
The very first cheese I made was cottage cheese. Very different process. I heated the milk, added the Rennet and allowed the curds to set for 12 hours before cutting and draining. The curds were so well set, there was no chance of error.
I love your videos but, Gosh! I wish you wouldn’t bang your metal spoon on the rim of your glass dish. Puh-Leeze use another utensil to scrape it off-maybe a silicone spatula. I would hate for you to end up with glass chips in your beautiful cottage cheese. ❤️
Hi. I love your videos. I have read that Australian tsp and tbsp are slightly different from the ones in U.S. Is there truth to that and if so could you clarify your measurements please? The difference in the tbsp could be 25% and I feel like that could cause some of the failures with your recipes I've had. Thanks.
I want to make cancoillette at home but it looks like I need metton affine first. Do you have a source for that or can you advise me on making it myself. I live in Florida and cannot find a source. Thanks
It is a precision cooker. The one I use is an Inkbird ISV-200W Wi-Fi Precision. Cooker Here is a link to a blog post I wrote about it. www.littlegreencheese.com/2022/08/difficulty-heating-milk-for-cheesemaking.html
i would be far more careful in measuring out that cream in the spoon you just had in the cottage cheese. I would think, based on the way you measured and scraped the spoon you just inoculated your cream with live culture
Idk why but I cant stand cottage cheese... I like every other cheese though....well most of them...havent had the one with the cheese jumpers...or stinking bishop...
Nice on tackling this!! I've always dried mine out for sevrral hours before adding cream. But the refrigerator method seems to have replaced this step. Going to try your method!! ❤ 🧀
Nice on tackling this!! I've always dried mine out for sevrral hours before adding cream. But the refrigerator method seems to have replaced this step. Going to try your method!! ❤ 🧀
