Cottage Cheese useful properties
Curd is the most valuable dairy product. It is useful and often necessary for children, as well as for adults.
Distinguish fatty cottage cheese, produced from whole milk, and skimmed, prepared from skim milk.
In low-fat curd contains a lot of high-grade milk proteins( 16%), mostly casein, almost completely assimilated by the human body. In addition, it contains lactic acid, minerals, in particular calcium salts, milk sugar, very little fat( 0.5%) and 80% water.
In fatty curd, in contrast to fat-free, contains at least 18% fat and not more than 65% water;produce also cottage cheese containing 9% fat.
Due to the large amount of fat and protein, the caloric content of fatty cottage cheese is high( in 100 grams of curds there are 253 large calories, while the caloric content of 100 g of low-fat cottage cheese is 86 large calories).The caloric content of fatty cottage cheese exceeds the average fatness of beef.
Curd is a favorable environment for the life of various microorganisms, for example milk mold, so it is poorly preserved, its quality deteriorates rapidly. Use it soon after purchasing in a store or manufacturing. Within 1-2 days the curd can be stored in the cold, for example in a home refrigerator.
You can eat only fresh curd, made from pasteurized milk, directly into your food. In curd raw milk can be unwanted microorganisms, sometimes even harmful to human health.
Cottage cheese, bought in the market or made from raw milk, and stored for a while at home, should not be consumed without pre-heat treatment. In this case, it must be heated to a high temperature, i.e., used only for the preparation of such dishes as cheese cakes, dumplings, etc.
The use of
The nutritional value of cottage cheese is determined by the quantity and quality of proteins, fat and mineral salts contained in it.
In curd cheese there is an essential amino acid - methionine, as well as choline, improving metabolism, preventing obesity and atherosclerosis.
Cottage cheese is especially useful for children, pregnant and lactating women, as it is rich in calcium and phosphorus salts necessary for bone growth, blood formation, heart and nervous system activity.
Cottage cheese is recommended for people with tuberculosis, anemic, needing a strengthened high-grade diet. It is useful in diseases of the liver and kidneys with edema, because calcium helps to remove excess fluid from the body.
Fatty cottage cheese is very nutritious. From it you can cook a lot of delicious and healthy dishes. The fat contained in the curd is assimilated by 90-95%.
Low-fat curd is recommended for obesity, gout, kidney disease, ie, when proteins of meat and fish are contraindicated, they are replaced with cottage cheese proteins.
Acidophilic yeast curd, used to feed weakened children, as well as gastrointestinal diseases, tuberculosis, anemia, is characterized by increased therapeutic properties. It is enriched with yeast and acidophilic cultures, which improve digestion. Low-fat and acidophilic yeast curds are also recommended for atherosclerosis, myocardial infarction, hypertension and colitis with diarrhea.
Homemade cooking
To cook a good cottage cheese at home, you must follow certain conditions.
First of all, one should steal or boil milk, since raw milk can contain both beneficial lactobacilli and harmful microorganisms. When heated to a high temperature, almost all microorganisms in raw milk, including harmful ones, die.
During pasteurization, milk, poured into a saucepan, should be heated, stirring, to 80 ° and kept at this temperature for 10-15 minutes, taking off the pan from the fire. The milk temperature during pasteurization should be measured with an alcohol thermometer( without a wooden frame).
Then the hot milk must be cooled as fast as possible to a temperature of 32-36 °.It is best to lower the pan with hot milk in another dish with cold water, not allowing water to enter the milk and several times changing the water.
In chilled milk pour a thin trickle, stirring, the ferment containing lactic bacteria( about 2-3 tablespoons per 1 liter of milk).Essentially, it turns out curdled milk.
Yeast can serve as ready-made sour milk( not acidophilic only) or good sour cream. It is best to use a special starter for cottage cheese, sour cream or sour oil, which can be purchased in laboratories that produce bacterial leaven for the production of various dairy products.
Mix the fermented milk with a spoon, cover the saucepan and place in a warm place.
Leave the milk in rest until ripening, i.e. before clot formation.
The finished clot should be sufficiently dense, to have smooth edges on the fracture, a glossy smooth surface, and the serum to be separated should be transparent, greenish in color.
You can not use a fermented, weak clot for the preparation of cottage cheese. Of such a clot, serum is poorly released and cottage cheese of low quality is obtained. You should not overdo too much milk - the cottage cheese will be sour.
Serum should be partially removed from the resulting clot. To do this, it should be cut into rectangular pieces, transfer them to a strainer or colander, treated with boiling water and covered with gauze folded in half. It is even better to lay uncut clot with a large spoon in layers on gauze, laid on a strainer or colander.
To accelerate the separation of serum, the cut clot can be gently heated to 36-38 °.To do this, put the pan with a clot into the basin with hot water and a spoon gently move the top layers of it from one wall of the pan to the other. In this case, the pieces of the clot from the bottom of the pan rise, and the upper ones go down, which promotes a uniform warming of the mass and a better separation of the whey. Then the clot is transferred to a sieve covered with gauze, to drain the whey.
When the separation of whey ceases, the curd mass in the gauze should be cooled and, if necessary, pressed. To do this, put curd with boiled water on the curd in gauze, and place the load on it. Pressed cottage cheese to a cold place.
Sometimes at home for the preparation of cottage cheese they use raw milk, which is accidentally sour after storage in unfavorable conditions. This can not be done, because from raw raw milk, unwanted microorganisms will pass into cottage cheese. Do not use for the preparation of cottage cheese, and accidentally sour pasteurized milk.
In cooking
Fat and skim curd are widely used for the production of a variety of curd products. At the same time, flavor and aroma substances, sugar, raisins, candied fruits, cocoa, vanillin or salt, caraway seeds, dill, etc., and butter are added to it.
Sweet curd products are produced with different fat content: high-fat, fatty, bold and fat-free.
For curd high-fat products( 20-26% fat) are: sweet curd cheese special mass, curd cheese Moscow, curd cheese curds sweet special, cheese curd cheeses for children. They are prepared from cottage cheese, processed to a homogeneous consistency, which is added butter or cream, sugar( 16-26%), as well as flavor and aroma: honey, candied fruits, raisins, dried apricots, marmalade, nut kernels( walnuts, hazelnuts,peanuts), vanillin, cocoa, coffee extract, cinnamon, etc.
This group also includes glazed curds, which are high-fat curd sweet curds covered with chocolate glaze.
Quark cakes close to this group of products are used for the production of cottage cheese with a high fat content( 22-26%), sugar( 26-30%) and flavoring, as well as flavorings. From the mass, rectangular or round pieces of 250, 500, 1000 and 2000 g are formed and their surface is decorated with a creamy cream.
Cottage cheese products are fatty( about 15% fat), bold( about 7% fat) and low-fat ones are produced in the form of curd mass and curd cheese with those or other flavoring and aromatic substances.
In addition to these sweet curd products, they also produce curd creams with vanilla, chocolate and other additives. They contain at least 18% fat and at least 30% sugar beet.
Salted curd products include curd mass and curd curd cheeses( 15.5-17.5% fat), bold( at least 8.5% fat) and fat-free. In the production of these products, only salt or salt with various flavoring and aromatic substances and spices is added to the crushed cottage cheese: tomato puree, cumin, dill, sweet pepper, red pepper, etc.
. The cheese mass
To prepare the cheese mass, wipe the curd through a sieve or pass through a meat grinder. Add sugar to it and, if desired, butter, melted to a creamy state.
Some sugar( about 1/2) can be replaced with natural honey. To add flavor to the cheese mass, vanillin can be added, premixed with a part of the granulated sugar.
To make chocolate cheese mass, to cottage cheese, in addition to sugar and butter, add cocoa powder. To the sweet cheese mass, you can add the cut candied fruits, dried apricots, marmalade or raisins to small pieces.
To distribute the substances evenly, the cottage cheese must be mixed thoroughly.
Add salt to the grated cottage cheese and - if desired - any spices, for example cumin, dill, pepper, tomato puree. It will be a salty cheese mass.4
To prepare 1 kg of sweet cheese mass to fatty cottage cheese, add 130-170 g of sugar, 85-130 g of butter, 60-100 g of raisins, candied fruits, marmalade, 20 g of cocoa powder, 0.1 g of vanillin;to obtain 1 kg of salted cheese mass - 15 g of table salt, 5-15 g of cumin, 1 g of dill, 1 g of sweet pepper, 100 g of tomato puree.
Production of cottage cheese
This gentle, slightly sour dairy product has long been very popular in our country. And no wonder - cottage cheese is nutritious, tasty, indispensable in the manufacture of many dishes as the first, second and third. Cheeses, cheese cakes, vareniki - this is not the most delicious that you can cook from cottage cheese. Cottage cheese is produced in both rural and urban plants. Its production is based on the allocation of milk from such valuable components as protein and fat. And here lactobacilli come to the rescue.
In the state dairy factories, cottage cheese is produced from pasteurized milk, for which fermentation is used a ferment from specially selected lactic acid bacteria in laboratories. This guarantees a high quality product.
Cottage cheese shop. Rows on the site are large reservoirs - tanks with a capacity of up to 2,5 thousand liters each. At the Ostankino Dairy Plant in Moscow, for example, 20 such baths are installed. This means that simultaneously here it is possible to process about 50 tons of milk. And how much will the cottage cheese be? It will be approximately 8 tons, ie, 6 times less, the rest is serum.
Sour milk in a bath is a homogeneous mass, the so-called clot. To completely separate the serum, it can be heated, as do, producing cottage cheese at home. But in urban dairy plants, instead, a small amount of rennet enzyme is added to the milk at the beginning of the process, which simplifies the work.
The resulting clot is cut with special knives into small cubes, and a clear green liquid appears in the cut points. The mass in the bath is divided into two layers - one consists of brilliant white cubes, the other is serum. It is removed from the bath. To get a cottage cheese that satisfies the requirements of technical conditions in terms of moisture content, the cottage cheese mass is pressed. To do this, it is placed in coarse sacks, which are placed on a special cart-press. Pressing continues until the serum ceases to drain. This process occurs at a low temperature.
This old production method is gradually being replaced with a new one. It consists in the production of low-fat cottage cheese from skimmed milk, which is then mixed with cream, resulting in a product of standard fat content. Thanks to this, the production cycle is accelerated, raw materials are saved and production is increased.
In the production of cottage cheese, the temperature regime is observed with an accuracy of one degree, carefully controlling the acidity of the product.
All this is done in order to get high quality cottage cheese.
Earlier, cottage cheese was produced for sale only in wooden tubs. Currently, a significant part of it comes to stores in the form of briquettes of 500 grams, packed in thick paper. At many dairy factories for packing of cottage cheese special automatic machines are used. Every minute such an automatic machine can give up to 16 semi-kilogram briquettes of cottage cheese.