Easy recipe for full fat cottage cheese with probiotics and enzymes intact which is virtually impossible to find at supermarkets or healthfood stores.
In the Western world, cottage cheese is nearly synonymous with dieting and all things related to the pursuit of skinny.
Cottage cheese is typically served with sliced fruit on top as an ultra low-calorie meal. It’s been the poster child for losing weight since the lowfat dogma of the 1960s took hold and escorted Westerners down a path to even greater weight and health challenges.
Unfortunately, the madness continues in conventional circles to this day. The American Heart Association recently blasted coconut oil as heart unhealthy. Seriously?
Why then did ancestral cultures that ate LOTS of it suffer virtually no heart disease? No wonder an increasing number of people don’t pay any attention and choose to do their own research.
While cottage cheese is certainly a nutritious, traditional food (Little Miss Muffet was probably eating something similar while sitting on her tuffet), it has, in the modern sense, seriously lost its way.
Supermarket and even organic health food store cottage cheese is highly processed and lowfat. Such concoctions are more likely to trigger binge eating than satisfy and proactively assist with sustainable weight loss goals.
This is because the skim milk from which the cottage cheese is made, organic or not, has had all the nutrient-dense cream removed. Worse, it has been pasteurized at high temperatures destroying much of the nutrition (Vitamins C and E, B12, B1, B2, folate). Digestive enzymes and beneficial microbes known as probiotics are obliterated as well.
And, as anyone who truly understands nutrition knows, skim milk and anything made with it encourages weight gain much more readily than helps you lose weight! Just ask any pastured pig farmer – skim milk is a key tool to get the pigs really fat!
Sourcing Truly Healthy Cottage Cheese
Finding probiotic and enzyme-rich, full fat cottage cheese is very difficult if not impossible depending on where you live. If you’re lucky enough to source locally, chances are it will be from a small grassfed dairy.
As a result, if you’re a cottage cheese lover like I am, it’s best to learn how to make it yourself. Fortunately, the process of making truly traditional cheese of the modern cottage variety is simple.
And, when you handcraft and consume curds and whey in this manner, it really will help you with your weight loss goals because, in a word, it will truly satisfy!
Probiotic, Enzyme Rich and Full Fat
The best recipe for full fat, raw cottage cheese (newsflash: the way it’s supposed to be) that I’ve seen is actually illustrated in The Nourishing Traditions Cookbook for Children.
That’s right, healthy cottage cheese is so simple to make a child can actually do it!
If you want to teach your children the basics of traditional cooking, this lovely little cookbook is a must-have. It’s spiral bound for easy page flipping by little hands and contains ingredient illustrations instead of hard to follow ingredient lists.
My daughter and I have been poring through it this summer to expand her culinary knowledge. I highly recommend it for anyone with children 10 and under.
Homemade Cottage Cheese
Many thanks to author Sally Fallon Morell for generously allowing the sharing of this recipe and ingredient illustration from The Nourishing Traditions Cookbook for Children.
Equipment Needed
The image below shows the equipment and ingredients you will need to get started making the homemade cottage cheese recipe.
Cottage Cheese Recipe
Easy recipe for full fat cottage cheese with probiotics and enzymes intact which is virtually impossible to find at supermarkets or healthfood stores.
Ingredients
Instructions
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Pour the milk into a large mixing bowl (I use these glass bowls). Cover the bowl with a plate and leave it in the refrigerator until all the cream rises to the top. This might take up to 24 hours.
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Skim off the cream with a spoon or easier still, a stainless steel turkey baster, and save it in a pint sized glass mason jar or similar container in the refrigerator (hint: you will use it later!).
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Mix the kefir or yogurt into the milk with a spoon. Cover the bowl with a plate once more and leave on the counter at room temperature until the milk thickens like yogurt. This is what is called the curd and it will take 1-2 days depending on your home’s temperature and the freshness of the raw milk.
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Using a knife, cut the curd in the bowl into tiny squares by slicing through it from top to bottom and left to right. Try to keep the cuts no larger than 1/4 – 1/2 inch (.64 cm – 1.3 cm) apart.
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Fill a medium sized pot with filtered water about 1 inch deep. Put the pot on the stovetop with the burner set to low heat. Place the bowl of curds with the plate removed on top.
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Test the temperature of the curds every 5 minutes with a digital food thermometer. After each 5 minute check, stir the curds for a few seconds. Continue with this process for about 30 minutes (6 – 5 minute checks) until the curds reach 110 F/43 C. All enzymes and probiotics will be preserved if you only heat to this low temperature. How to know? If you stick your finger in and don't get burned, no destruction of beneficial microbes or enzymes has occurred. This would happen if you heat the milk higher than 117 F/47 C, which is why it is so important to keep checking the cottage cheese every 5 minutes to ensure that the temperature doesn't get too high.
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Remove the bowl from the heat when the desired temperature has been reached and separate the curds from the whey with a strainer set inside a mixing bowl. The curds will stay in the strainer and the liquid whey will run into the bowl underneath.
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Rinse the curds still inside the strainer with cold, filtered water. Be sure to very gently stir the curds with a spoon until all the water drains out.
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Put the curds in a container and mix with the sea salt and reserved cream you have in the refrigerator. You now have raw, full fat cottage cheese with all the beneficial probiotics, vitamins and enzymes from the raw milk still intact! Cottage cheese is delicious freshly made, but be sure to refrigerate any leftovers. In my experience, this truly traditional cottage cheese lasts for several weeks in the refrigerator.
Recipe Notes
Full fat yogurt may be substituted for the kefir. These yogurt brands are best.
More Information on Healthy Cheese
If learning to make cheese is exciting to you, check out my other cheesemaking posts here:
- Drowning in Whey? Make Gjetost Cheese.
- Video: Cream Cheese and Liquid Whey.
- Cheese Making: Common Problems and Solutions.
- How to Make Yogurt Cheese.
- Three Ways to Make Ricotta Cheese (plus video how-to)
Thanks. I have my kids on the GAPS diet and make a lot if 24 hour yogurt. I guess what I am asking is if there are different nutrients or better ones in the cottage cheese or the yogurt? I am also giving my ) month old yogurt but was considering making dry curds too.
What is the benefit of this vs 24 hour yogurt? Especially for a baby? Also can I use cultured buttermilk instead?
24 hour yogurt has all of the lactose fermented away. Yogurt fermented for less than 24 hours still has lactose. You can use cultured buttermilk, but again it must be fermented for a full 24 hours. If you buy ANY fermented dairy from the store, it has only been fermented for a few hours. Thus you are almost certainly going to have to make it yourself.
I seldom take the time to leave a comment, but I just finished making this. Followed the recipe exactly, and it turned out beautifully!! It’s sooooo delicious! Thank you.
I noticed you suggested using Stonefield Organic yogurt. You need to do more research on what and how they get and treat their “organic” milk. It is not what they advertise.
Marti
My raw milk refuses to change unless I heat it up sadly. I’ve been told it’s the enzymes in the milk that battle the yogurt enzymes. I’ve yet to find a method that works by NOT heating the milk past 117°.
You said we would use the cream later but I’m not seeing where?!?! What do I do with it?
It’s mixed in at the end so that the cottage cheese is full fat. It’s there in the recipe 🙂
Is it ok that I used the raw milk that was going on the sour side? I’ve had it for about 3 weeks now, also I’ve had it on the counter in the bowl for about 4 days and forgot to add the yogurt . Should I just throw this away?
Yes, you can use sour raw milk, but note that the cottage cheese will be sour tasting too.
“I salt is important and should not be left out else the recipe may not “take”.”
I haven’t reached the step where we add in the sea salt, but my bowl of milk didn’t take. I used raw jersey milk and skimmed off the cream, mixed it in a bowl with the yogurt and left it for 24 hours.
It just had a thick layer on the top so I left it another 24 hours. Still was not solid, just the whatever was on top was thick so I added more plain yogurt thinking because my total amound of skimmed milk was a full half gallon instead of using half a gallon minus the cream, I might have needed more yogurt. I used Stoneyfield organic.
So I let that sit another 12 hours but it’s still not taking. I have it in the fridge now. Do you know where I may have gone wrong and is there any way to still make cottage cheese from it? Or even cream cheese from it? Sorry, I don’t know what I’m doing!
But thank you SO MUCH for the recipe. I am going to try the Budwig Protocol using it but it requires just 2% fat cottage cheese that you with blend flax oil. Will save the nutritious cream for something else.
I would love to try the cottage cheese recipe but, where I live, it ‘s illegal to sell raw milk, so, I cannot get any raw milk.
I can get grass fed, 3.5% fat, pasteurized milk.
Would that work?
This is great, I didn’t know cottage cheese could be probiotic! I always assumed that somehow with the process it took to make cottage cheese there was no way for it to have the same gut benefits other dairy type products like yogurt could have. Thank you for sharing this! I can’t wait to have cottage cheese with all the same benefits I want from my probiotic foods!