Don’t want to use vinegar to make your homemade cottage cheese? Do you want your cottage cheese to be healthier? No problem, you can make cottage cheese with lemon juice too. Lemon juice is healthy, so no worries if it goes into your food.
There are several methods of making cottage cheese. You can make cottage cheese by using distilled vinegar, lemon juice, yogurt, or sour milk.
I am using fresh milk today, so I decided to use the lemon juice method.
Soft Curd Cottage Cheese Recipe (Milk and Lemon juice, No Vinegar!)
Ingredients:
- 1 gallon of Whole Milk (I used whole raw A2 milk)
- 7-8 Tablespoons of fresh Lemon juice
- 2 pinch Sea Salt
How to make cottage cheese from milk and lemon juice:
- Pour milk into a large pot and heat until the edges start to foam. Remove from heat after that.
- Add the lemon juice to the heated milk stirring thoroughly.
- Cover the pot and let sit for 30 minutes, or until you see the curds have separated.
- Line a colander with cheese close or use a large nut milk bag.
- Slowly pour the curds and whey into the colander allowing the whey to drain. Keep the whey in the fridge for other recipes like breakfast crepes, dough or others.
- Tie the corners of the cheesecloth and rinse the curds in filtered water to get rid of the acid taste. Optional.
- After the cottage cheese is cool, squeeze the remaining liquid out, then add salt and mix. Transfer to a glass container with a lid.
- Before serving, add cream and honey/maple syrup to taste and mix! Yum!!
Cottage cheese is delicious with whipping cream! You can also add fresh flaxseed oil to the cottage cheese to make a nutritious Budwig breakfast, which feeds our inner cells (per Budwig protocol). You can also make a cottage cheese paste and use it as a stuffing in crepes and rolls. Hey, you can even make cookies, cakes using cottage cheese. The possibilities are endless!
Troubleshooting
1. Why my milk did not separate into curds and whey even after one hour? If you see your milk did not separate into curds and whey, but instead there are some curds and milk, then it means your milk was not hot enough when you added the lemon juice. In order to fix it, you will need to warm up your milk again and then it will separate into curds and whey. After it separates, quickly strain the curds, and keep the whey for other purposes.
2. How to make cheese from raw milk? If you want to make cottage cheese, you will still need to heat the milk but without boiling it. I use raw milk, and I used the above recipe and my cottage cheese turned out great.
3. Will this cottage cheese have a lemon taste?
My cottage cheese which was prepared using the recipe above had a little lemony flavor, but it was not sour or acidic at all. You can rinse the cheese with filtered water and drain the water if you don’t want that lemon flavor. However, the flavor is not strong and it’s barely noticeable. I liked (actually, loved!) the lemon flavor in my cottage cheese.
You can also try other cottage cheese recipes:
How to Make Cottage Cheese from Sour Milk (coming soon)
How to Make Old-fashioned Cottage Cheese (coming soon)
When do you add the salt?
You add the salt to the curd after straining it out. Fixed the recipe, thank you for mentioning it!