welcome friends today in the kitchen we are going to be making cottage cheese
and just like a lot of things in the food world there are different ways to
get to the end and so I'm going to do cottage cheese two ways I'm gonna do the
old school cheese maker from the 1400s version and I'm going to do the sort of
new school internet blog version so they both start out with milk and you have to
heat the milk up to very specific temperatures so into this pot milk I
thought it was kind of funny a couple of weeks ago one of our videos was part of
a discussion on reddit and it wasn't a discussion about the recipe or the video
or about how much they hated me it was people laughing at milk in bags and
talking about milk in bags yes we buy milk in bags we buy a big bag of milk
and inside the big bag of milk there's four litres and it's cut between three
smaller bags and every house has a little plastic jug put the milk bag in a
little plastic jug and a lot of people have this handy little cutter that
attaches to the jug and you just clip off the corner stick the little plastic
bit through a hole on the side and there's your milk easy it's been that
way for a very long time although it's mostly just prevalent in central Canada
you see it a little bit in other parts of Canada but central Canada Ontario
that's where you mostly see it now I've got a thermometer in each pot and an
alarm set when it reaches a certain point so the one with with the bacteria
and the rennet it relies on bacteria and an enzyme changing the way the milk
reacts and you have to be very careful and specific with your temperatures on
that one the one
that uses the vinegar you can take it up to a lot hotter which in theory takes
less time because you're just waiting for the acid in this white vinegar to do
its work so totally different process one has two ingredients and one has
three ingredients although I've got a whole pile of different ingredients out
here to talk about the next thing that goes into this pot as soon as we get up
to 85 degrees Fahrenheit the next thing that goes into this pot is you want to
inoculate it with a mesophilic bacterial culture now you can buy this culture
online in a little packet it comes dry you can buy it from a cheese shop you
can buy it online from say Amazon but a lot of the recipes that I see online
counsel you to use buttermilk I'm gonna put a link up here to my rant about
buttermilk all buttermilk sold in North America is pretty much cultured
buttermilk which means they put bacteria into it but the problem is even though
this has the bacteria that we're looking for 99% of all buttermilk sold in North
America is pasteurized before it's sent to the store which means they've killed
all of the bacteria that we're looking for so it's not really going to do the
job that we want it to do second on the list is kefir kefir is available in
pretty much every grocery store in North America I mean I've seen it in tiny
little grocery stores in the Ozarks and if you can find it there you can find it
pretty much anywhere it's also available across Europe and so it is never
pasteurized it seems it always comes with live bacterial culture and the
bacteria that's in this one is the bacteria that we want in that pot so
we're at 74 degrees Fahrenheit we want to get this up to 85 before we move on
to the next step okay so the temperature is almost there on this pot so I'm gonna
talk about the next ingredient because it's gonna move pretty quickly the next
ingredient is rennet rennet is an enzyme traditionally made from the lining of an
animal's stomach there is vegetable rennet available I think it's made from
thistles it'll do the same job so if you're weirded out by
the lining of a pig or a cow's stomach in your cheese then maybe you shouldn't
be eating cheese because it's mostly made from that but you can buy a
vegetable rennet this is called junket these are dry rennet tablets and I've
had limited success with this this makes an incredible pudding incredible pudding
I love junket pudding um but for making cheese I found it's not terribly
reliable I've get mixed results with it so I tend to want to use actual liquid
rennet liquid rennet doesn't last as long junket tablets can be in your
cupboard forever and still work or though maybe they don't still work so
here I've got a little bit of water and you only need like four drops for this
amount of milk so I drop it into a little bit of water just to make it
easier to mix into the milk okay so we are at 86 degrees Fahrenheit which is
about right we were shooting for 85 you definitely don't want to go over 90 so
as soon as you reach that point turn off the heat
I've got a really good heavy pot here it's gonna retain a lot of heat but it
will also have carryover heat so even after you turn off the burner the
temperature may rise so the first thing in is we mix in the kefir stir that in
and the temperature is very important with this one because above ninety
degrees Fahrenheit it's going to both kill the bacteria that we want and stop
the enzyme action so that temperature of between 80 to 90 to start is really
important and you don't want it to drop below say 75 over the course of making
it so depending on where you are and what your room temperature is you may
have to wrap it in a towel later or just keep the heat on gently there we go so
next in is the rennet mixed in the water and we just pour that in and give it a
really good stir you just want to make sure that it's fully mixed in and
combined that's good now we just put a lid on and
wait so this one has reached our target temperature of 120 this one is not like
I said this one is not as dependent on temperature it's not as critical and so
in goes the vinegar and we stir that in and you're gonna notice as soon as you
stir it in the whole thing's gonna change so turn off that burner because I
don't want it to get any hotter and immediately you start to see curds
forming so you just stir that in gently make sure that it's fully distributed
okay so the one with the rennet and the cultures it's thickening up but it's not
quite ready yet the one with the vinegar it's done all
that it's gonna do so the next step is to drain it and to do that you need some
cheesecloth and get yourself some quality cheesecloth that stuff that you
get at the grocery store isn't very good for this process you need something with
a much finer mesh some people are gonna call it butter muslin this is grade 90
which refers to the weave and you don't need a piece this big I just know that
this quality I can reuse it over and over and over again and having it a
little bit bigger makes it easy to squeeze out the way later so take this
and you just pour it into your cheesecloth
now just let this drain you want the way to drain away I'm saving it because I'm
gonna make Rococo with it so come on back for that episode I'm going to be
doing it with both of the leftover ways squeeze this as dry as you can run it
under a cold tap and keep squeezing it until you get rid of all the way as much
of the ways you can get rid of the cheese will last longer okay so this is
totally set I don't know if you can see that but it jiggles jiggle-jiggle-jiggle
so now we need to cut the curd and instead of using a knife and scratching
the bottom of my pot and ruining the blade on a knife I'm just gonna use one
of these palette knives that you use for the frosting a cake since I'm no good at
frosting a cake anyway I'm not going to hurt this so let's cut the curd so you
want to slice it like this and then turn 90 degrees and slice it the other way
into little cubes now as you're slicing you should see the way start to separate
a little bit and if you don't notice it a whole lot don't worry at this point
just just put your knife in on a 45 degree angle 45 degrees to the other
cuts and slice it again and that's going to do the job just fine now we need to
heat this up gently to about 115 degrees Fahrenheit and I mean gently bring it up
to 115 degrees Fahrenheit we need to cook it for about an hour hour and a
half in order to cook the way out of the curds so you want to do this very gently
you want to do it very slowly all of the information will be in the recipe box
below so this has been cooking for about an hour and a half and you can see the
curds are really sort of pronounced and nice and stiff and the way is this sort
of clear yellowy color whereas this is the way that it's left
over from the vinegar batch and you can see that it is really white so I'm gonna
go out on a limb and take a wild guess and say that I'm probably going to get
twice as much cottage cheese from the rennet version
exactly the same process now pour it out into a sieve lined with some cheesecloth
squeeze as much of the way out as possible and then rinse it and squeeze
it again and again I'm going to save this way to make ricotta it's three
cheese Monte okay so has the dollar under it yeah so I've made I have made
what am I looking at gee I've made two cheeses and one is a store-bought cheese
I leave me to sew inside me they are cottage cheese so two of them I've made
using a different process and one is store-bought and I've written on the
bottom of the ball I've tried to put as much the exact same amount in each bowl
and I'm pretty much at this point forgotten which one is which but I sort
of have an idea you have no clue okay so I'm gonna say visually I'm gonna say
that's the store-bought but that's not the kid that I'm just there's my first
vote okay so the one in the middle Julie says right off the bat is the
store-bought let's taste good over here
so it's got the flavor hmm yeah but it's not chunky it's a little bit grainy I'm
saying that one's a little bit really fine curd
yeah like it's not the chunky kind of cheese kind of thing you expect don't
like that one at all spit that out I would so that one's got the chunky but
it's sour it's got a real tank yeah yeah yeah
don't like that one okay I almost need a juice in between that one's really tangy
that one has a really strong flavor yep and then this one creamy you have it
that one's super creamy but doesn't have any flavor I was gonna say the flavors
not right yeah it's kind of bland no flavor super creamy this one is the most
flavorful up to me most flavorful with a little bit grainy and I think we both
agree that was not right that one's bitter yeah I'd eat this one okay if I
was gonna choose that's the one I would choose to eat yep first second third
okay I think I would choose that one first to eat cuz I like the mouthfeel I
don't think it has the flavor that I like but it has the mouthfeel I'm up for
the flavor I like my feel I like the flavor of this one no but I don't like
the medal that's just a personal thing store-bought crap well okay and the one
that Julie likes is the one made with vinegar and the one that I like is the
one made with rennet okay interesting so and you know why I picked that one is
this doorbot this one yeah mainly because I figured I figured it would be
able to have the the chunky texture more so than you would as a as a homemaker
you know what I mean yep as a homemaker that's a tough thing to cut hold up and
that's really what it was based on so it's really interesting because his
first guest the one that was made with the rennet mm-hmm
took the longest to make and I had the I this one made three times as much cheese
as the one that was made with vinegar out of the same amount of milk okay
I knew that context yeah three times as much cheese out of the same amount of
milk which means this one has a whole bunch of and I'll sort of list them a
whole bunch of different milk proteins that were caught up and made into the
cheese coagulated and made where's white has the texture pot which is white has a
texture that texture whereas this one is probably only made up of one main milk
protein that is curdled by the dagger which is interesting that it has a
different flavor and I wonder if that flavor is partly from the citric the the
vinegar acid or its citric acid or whatever you could use to make it but I
think we both agree that the viscosity that was the least favorite yes the
store-bought was the least favorite okay so um I guess at home you have to choose
whether you want to spend three days Oh whole day all day all day making
something that has amazing mouthfeel or just a couple of hours to make something
that's pretty good but you don't get much of mmm although this the way that
was left over from this one you're gonna find out in the next episode that I was
able to turn that way into ricotta oh very nice yeah so um this is a
two-for-one so but on a different note what if you blended the two would you
get a happy medium I don't yeah I think so I I think I think either of these two
would be great for anything that should cook cottage cheese in I mean we're just
tasting it now well yeah I mean that and that's that one I think would be better
if you're putting it in something where you're looking for the cheese to be that
creamy kind of Sonia or some well that's it a lot of people put cheese instead of
ricotta because it is when you go to the grocery store don't less-expensive yeah
um so there you go give it a try thanks for stopping by
see you can soon