Cottage cheese for baking, making desserts, mousses and creams must be grinded, especially if it is coarse-grained. Cottage cheese in any product should be an air mass, and not clumping large lumps.
Pick your recipe
You will need
- - cottage cheese;
- - a sieve;
- - wooden spoon;
- - grater;
- - meat grinder;
- - pusher for mashed potatoes with holes;
- - a blender.
Instruction manual
1
First, learn how to choose a good cottage cheese. The most useful is nonfat cottage cheese and cooked in a raw way, that is, fermenting milk or adding fermentation to it. In cooking, fat cottage cheese is most often used. Good cottage cheese should be fresh, free from odors other than sour milk, have a white color with a light cream tint. The grain of a good cottage cheese is average, and it forms layers in structure.
2
There are several ways to grind cottage cheese. To obtain homogeneous mass from cottage cheese, the first and most “ancient” method is grinding through a sieve. Extra curd is squeezed out of the curd (with your hands or under the press) - whey. Then take a regular sieve or colander of medium size with a very fine metal mesh. A large spoon, preferably a wooden one, curd is placed in small portions into a sieve and rubbed under the pressure of a spoon. Grated cottage cheese becomes airy, has no lumps, graininess. To achieve the required fine structure, a single grinding is sufficient.
3
If there is no sieve on the farm, you can use a meat grinder. Before this, it is also important to remove excess liquid from the curd. A meat grinder must be thoroughly washed and wiped dry all the parts so that there are no extraneous odors (cottage cheese quickly absorbs odors). Cottage cheese is placed in a meat grinder and ground like minced meat. It is better to choose the smallest nozzle. If necessary, you can scroll the cottage cheese twice.
4
You can make the curd less grainy and more uniform with a mashed potato with holes. This method is not so laborious than grinding through a sieve, but the result is not so good. After the sieve, the cottage cheese is more homogeneous, and after the crush, some of the grains in the cottage cheese are preserved.
5
In extreme cases, you can use a grater. Not the smallest, for potato pancakes, and not large beetroot, but medium. Grind the cottage cheese on a grater will have to hands. Gather a handful of cottage cheese in your hand, squeeze it into a tight lump and move it up and down on the grater, pushing the curd mass until it passes inside. You may need to do this operation twice.
6
The most convenient and easiest way to grind cottage cheese today is a blender. The curd mass in the blender is no worse than rubbed through a sieve, and the process is much easier and faster. For a blender, you do not need to squeeze out excess water from the curd, otherwise the blender will not pull the dry mass.