Cooking cheese at home is not difficult at all, you only need to adhere to the recommendations that are given in the recipes. Of course, few people would think of arranging a full-fledged production in their kitchen and preparing seasoned cheese, such as Dutch. At home, most often, soft or processed cheeses are prepared .
For example, here is a very simple recipe for making homemade cheese from cottage cheese. For cooking, it is best to use cottage cheese, which should be dry enough. Otherwise, you need to squeeze out the excess serum by placing it under the press.
To make cheese, we need a kilogram of cottage cheese, a tablespoon of fine salt and a little sour cream or cream. Rub the cottage cheese through a sieve and mix with salt, then add a little sour cream for a bunch. To form a cheese head, you need to sew a linen bag in the shape of a cone. The prepared mass fits very tightly into this container (no more than five hundred grams in one bag), the bag is tightly tied at the bottom. Then the filled bags are laid out on an inclined board, placing them with the corner up, and from above they press down with oppression. In this position, the cheese is aged for about ten hours. Such homemade cheese from cottage cheese can be eaten freshly prepared or seasoned. In the latter case, the cheese head is dried in a draft, and then it is taken to the cellar, keeping it on the shelf for two to three weeks. During aging, the cheese should be regularly turned over and washed with salt water on its surface.
If you want to make homemade cheese from cottage cheese, which tastes like Adyghe, you should use the following recipe. A kilogram of cottage cheese (it is better to take a product with a fat content of at least 9%) will require a liter of milk, three eggs, one hundred grams of good butter (margarine is absolutely not suitable for these purposes), one and a half tablespoons of salt and one tablespoon of ordinary baking soda.
We start to cook. We put boil milk in a large pan. As it boils, add the cottage cheese there and cook for about half an hour over medium heat, stirring the mass with a spoon. We cover the colander with gauze, which should be folded in half, wet in cold water and squeeze well. Pour the contents of our pan into a colander and let the serum drain. By the way, whey should not be thrown away; it can be successfully used for preparing different types of dough.
After the whey is separated, put the curd in a pan, adding beaten eggs, salt, oil and soda to it. The last ingredient will add porosity to our cheese, but it will not taste soda. Boil the mass with constant stirring for ten minutes.
Prepare containers for laying cheese. For this, you can use any form or cup. They need to be lined with cling film, on which a thin layer of melted butter is applied with a brush. We spread the semi-finished product of our cheese in a container and, after cooling, send the form to the refrigerator. In two or three hours, we will have homemade cheese ready. How to make the cooked product more savory? To do this, you can add seasonings, finely chopped greens or garlic to the finished cheese mass. The composition and amount of additives can be varied to your liking.
But here's how to make cream cheese at home from cottage cheese. The recipe for such cheese is almost no different in composition from the above, but the cooking technology is somewhat different.
For a pound of cottage cheese, we need two eggs, one hundred grams of butter, half a spoonful of salt and soda and a teaspoon of sugar. For seasoning, take a clove of garlic and a pinch of ground paprika, dried basil, turmeric and black pepper.
Cottage cheese for the preparation of this type of cheese must be dry. We put it in a pan and add all the other ingredients indicated in the recipe, except for spices. We mix everything very well and put the dishes on the fire. Heat, stirring, until our cheese begins to melt. For this, as a rule, it is required to heat a mass of fifteen minutes.
Now it's time to add spices. Again, you need to mix everything well, using an immersion blender or mixer for this purpose. Of course, you can try to stir the cheese manually, but it will take much more time. As a result, we should get a viscous homogeneous mass with the inclusion of particles of spice.
Pour the cheese into prepared containers and, after cooling, put in the refrigerator. According to this recipe, we get homemade cheese from cottage cheese, which can be cut with a knife. If you want to cook soft cream cheese that you can eat with a spoon, then at the stage of adding spices to the mass you need to add a little more water. Note that mixing water with cheese mass will not be very easy (especially if you do not use a mixer or a blender), however, with some effort, you can get a homogeneous semi-liquid mass that needs to be poured into containers and refrigerated.