Cottaging

Making cheese is fun, but it doesn't really work well with a low fat diet. Similarly, making beer is fun but doesn't really work well with a low calorie low alcohol diet. For the last few months I've tried flipping diets depending on what I'm going to consume next, but the sad reality is that this doesn't really work. Shocking, no?

In light of this I looked up some healthy cheeses. It turns out cottage cheese is a very healthy alternative to regular cheese, made from skimmed milk instead of full cream. There are actually a couple of types of cottage cheese - long-set small curd cheese and short-set large curd cheese. Long-set cheese is made by heating skimmed milk up to close to boiling point, curdling the milk with vinegar or lime juice and letting the milk slowly set over four or five hours (incidentally if you then press the curds you make paneer). Short-set cheese is made by using rennet (and in some recipes a starter) to help thicken the cheese, and so the curds set quicker and the curds are larger.

Being the impatient type with a freezer full of rennet short-set cheese looked the way to go, so I knocked up a batch of cottage cheese on Sunday. It was surprising how well the curds formed - I always thought it was the fats that formed the basis of the curd but it looks to be more based on the proteins in the milk - the fat just adds the flavour.

This is the cheese after the curds were cut and then cooked - you can see why cottage cheese is also known as 'popcorn cheese'.

The cottage cheese you buy is normally mixed with other things to give a lumpy sauce, and having sampled this I'm not surprised as it was pretty rubbery & tasteless. Fortunately the cottage cheese wasn't the end goal - I'd also read about a style of cheese called 'hoop cheese' or 'farmers cheese', which is pressed cottage cheese. This seemed perfect - a kind of hard cheddar-ish cheese but with virtually no fat. So I pressed my cheese curds - possibly a little too enthusiastically it seems. 

After a few days in a container in the fridge a rind of sorts was starting to form, but essentially I'd managed to produce a disk of something resembling a large hockey puck, and tasting much the same. More experimentation is required! Or preferably, more exercise and better cheese.....