Hey,
I am in the middle of heating the curd for cottage cheese and already the curd is falling apart so it isn't going to be the american large curd that I want. I don't know why my curd keep falling apart, this happened last week too, I have made it before with perfect outcome and now, same recipe, flop. I have been using the flop in cooking for already have some and really don't need more. My question is can I add some calcium chloride and make it into mozz? I haven't drained the whey yet and it is still cooking, any ideas?
PS can weather effect curd? It has gotten very hot (around 100*) (and humid, heat index around 105-114*) and we don't have AC.
Thanks for any info.
I've never made cottage cheese so can't really answer any of your questions. If no one wanders by who knows, perhaps you can find some information in older threads. 'Search' is in the upper right corner and 'cottage cheese' gives 4 pages of results. :)
No, you can't easily make mozz out of cottage curds.
Yes, ambient temp and set time absolutely affect the cheese. You have to hit the acidity targets with cottage cheese, it's especially important. I think yours might have too much acid. What was the set time? 100F ambient should take 4-6 hours.
Best you could do is to keep going and see if it will firm up. And if not, cook it until you get a solid farmer's cheese and make cheese gnocchi :)
Last year I didn't have AC in the cheese kitchen and it got HOT in there (yup, up to 100F!). I was new to cheese making (still am...) and had no clue why some recipes said to wait 1 hour and others for 12. So I could not make any of the cheeses that had long ripening times since the higher ambient temp should have had me stopping the ripening when the right acidity was reached rather than an arbitrary number of hours. Cottage cheese was the worst!
Quote from: SandHollerFarm on July 23, 2010, 02:46:26 PM
Last year I didn't have AC in the cheese kitchen and it got HOT in there (yup, up to 100F!). I was new to cheese making (still am...) and had no clue why some recipes said to wait 1 hour and others for 12. So I could not make any of the cheeses that had long ripening times since the higher ambient temp should have had me stopping the ripening when the right acidity was reached rather than an arbitrary number of hours. Cottage cheese was the worst!
Quote from: linuxboy on July 22, 2010, 02:01:04 PM
No, you can't easily make mozz out of cottage curds.
Yes, ambient temp and set time absolutely affect the cheese. You have to hit the acidity targets with cottage cheese, it's especially important. I think yours might have too much acid. What was the set time? 100F ambient should take 4-6 hours.
Best you could do is to keep going and see if it will firm up. And if not, cook it until you get a solid farmer's cheese and make cheese gnocchi :)
Thank you for your replies and sorry for my late replies, I have been gone for over a week volunteering at Camp Quality (a camp for children living with cancer) and just started getting back online.
The set time for the cottage cheese recipe I have is 20hrs and the temp in my living room has been around 100-101 during the day in the mid to high 80s-90s the rest of the time.
This is why my cottage cheese hasn't been working? Have tried again with the same result. If I only let the milk ripen for 4-6hrs I should be okay then?
Thanks a lot!
Yes, cut as soon as it coagulates.