Real cottage cheese without fakes and additives is a very useful and important product. Recently, however, unflattering reviews have been increasingly heard about the quality of cottage cheese on sale.
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How to choose the right cottage cheese so that the product does not cause harm? You can hardly find better than a village one, but this luxury is not available to every city dweller. Therefore, you have to purchase this product in different stores.
You need to pay attention to the following:
1 package
Tovorog must be dry; not sticky and not too wet, there should be no bulges. If this is cottage cheese in a blown vacuum packaging - such a product is better to bypass. It must be stored in a showcase with a refrigerator, since it quickly deteriorates when heated.
2. Shelf life
Release date should not be further than yesterday. Real cottage cheese is stored for no more than three days. If the expiration date indicated on the packaging exceeds this period, a large amount of preservatives and various chemicals, not always safe for health, are mixed in the product.
3. Appearance
By color, the most correct cottage cheese is white, with a light cream tint. Yellow or bluish tint of cottage cheese is a sign of long-term storage or lack of quality.
4. Smell
The smell of real cottage cheese is milky-sour. If it seemed to you very acidic, it is very likely that the product is stale, or made with violations of technology.
5. Taste
It tastes like real cottage cheese - tender and with a slight acidity, but not at all sour, all the more sweet. Sour cottage cheese is old, and the sweet taste is due to the addition of sugar to hide the high acid content. The fresh-tasting cottage cheese is simply tasteless and most likely contains starch or calcium chloride.
As a rule, the taste and color of packaged cottage cheese in a store cannot be tasted, but if you get low-quality goods, you need to remember the manufacturer and continue to refuse to purchase products under this brand.
It is also worth knowing that soft, paper, packaging of cottage cheese is not the best option, it is fragile, and it is easier to get pathogenic bacteria into it. Preference should be given to hard, plastic or vacuum packaging. It is tight, so the risk of getting pathogens in it is lower, and it’s easier to keep the product in it.
If the purpose of the purchase is precisely the curd, you should look for exactly this word on the label, but not “curd product”, “curd mass” in any way. All these products and masses are made with the addition of sugar or a substitute for milk fat, it is margarine, it is also hydrogenated vegetable fat.
The fat content of the cottage cheese, its energy and nutritional value, as well as the composition should be indicated on the label. Preservatives, thickeners and food additives reduce the quality of the product.
It is better, of course, to buy cottage cheese in a market where each batch of products undergoes sanitary and epidemiological control, there is a choice and you can not only have a good look at the cottage cheese you bought, but also smell it and even try it.