Thursday, January 12, 2017

Homemade cottage cheese ..... or not

A friend posted right on my Facebook wall the other day that she wanted me to do more blogging, and I thought, IKR. So do I! I wish I'd slam a post up here every day of 2017 just to show that bitch I'm not giving up. (I meant 2017, not my friend.) And then I promptly scrolled on down through my feed looking for something incriminating to share about The Donald instead of writing a blog post.

But back in the far, unaddicted recesses of my mind, I remembered. I remembered my poor, moldy, neglected blog. And today, as I was about to post some random shit on Facebook yet again, the thought elbowed its way past all the other thoughts about what to fix for supper and how I need to mop the kitchen floor and I promised Coraline we'd read our book and I need to make a list of stuff to take on the bus to the march on the 21st and ..... bam. I could post this shit on my blog, because it might be the single most interesting thing that will happen to me this entire day!

Short story short, I was trying to make homemade cottage cheese, and I made something else instead. Not sure what. I followed the directions on a website for making cottage cheese with raw milk. I put about a quart of raw milk into a bowl and left it covered with a cotton towel on the counter. The next day, I skimmed off the sour cream, which was kinda weird and stretchy. More like a skin than a cream.

The milk was supposed to curdle into cottage cheese within a couple of days, but that shit just sat there. For days. Three days at least. (I can't really remember when I set it there.) And it didn't curdle.

I might have forgotten to check it for a couple of days. I get busy doing things I can't remember the next day.

Today I remembered to lift the towel. And at first I thought it still hadn't done anything. Just like a fucking last-minute science fair experiment, like a potato battery or the life cycle of bean seeds. Out of curiosity and a desire to avoid scrubbing the kitchen floor, I pulled out a spoon and stirred it around. Damn. It had changed after all, but not into curds and whey. It has changed into some kind of yeasty-smelling stuff the consistency of yogurt. Very little whey. No wonder Little Miss Muffet ran away. She wasn't afraid of spiders. She was afraid of what was growing in her bowl.



I'm still debating whether to taste it. I don't want to die before my first ever march on Washington DC. That would be cruel. And unnecessary, given the readily available cottage cheese just sitting there in the Kroger dairy case. Also, I've been doing so well eating low carb since the first of the year, and I have no idea how many carbs might be lurking in that fermented bowl of what used to be raw milk.

I put the towel back on and left it there. It might not have finished transforming. Also, I need to mop the floor before I taste it. I'd hate to kill myself with a failed science experiment and leave a dirty kitchen floor behind. How embarrassing would that be?


4 comments:

  1. Hehehe! It's been years since I worked for a dairy processing company that is still envied for its tasty, high quality cottage cheese...however I do not recall the milk being left sitting around at room temperature in order for it to be created! I believe every batch was seeded with bacterial culture (and maybe salt?) to get the magic happening. Then the whey was poured off and a dressing (of milk and I don't know what else) was added.

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  2. I probably should have done more research, but the blogger whose recipe I used apparently makes this recipe a lot. A friend did some research, and apparently I made clabber. I've used Clabber Girl baking powder, but I didn't realize clabber was what some people used for leavening before baking powder existed. I still haven't decided what to do with it, if anything. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clabber_(food)

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  3. lol! I've been wanting to try and make my own ricotta. This post is not encouraging me. ;-)

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    1. Definitely make the ricotta. That I've made a bunch of times, and it's apparently much easier to get the right finished product.

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