Have you wondered how to make cottage cheese yourself from scratch? Well, wonder no more. We created this post to show you how to make your own cottage cheese from scratch in 15 min. You only need 2 active minutes so feel free to multitask until the milk is heated on the stove. You also need 2 ingredients to make cottage cheese. It is so simple! Plus we don’t add any dressing to the curds as the store-bought cottage cheese has.
Our family makes cottage cheese from scratch and enjoys it with fruit for snacks and breakfast. I also use cottage cheese in dinner recipes (stuffed peppers being my favorite where I use cottage cheese instead of feta!) or as a cheese substitute sometimes. Homemade cottage cheese has far fewer calories than feta cheese, crumbled cheese, or some other cheese options. We also don’t add any extra dressing (cream) as the store-bought cottage cheese has.
Sometimes, we don’t use all the milk as planned and the best-by-date approaches very fast. Sometimes I have bought milk from the store only with 4 days left as best-by-date and just realize that at home. In those cases, I love making cottage cheese with extra milk. The liquid left after I strain the cottage cheese, which I use for smoothies. Curdling milk is very simple and easy!
Ingredients for Cottage Cheese
It is really easy to make cottage cheese. All you need is milk and yogurt to make cottage cheese. Our cottage cheese is not as creamy as the store-bought one because we don’t add any additional cream. My kids don’t eat store-bought cottage cheese because they think it is too mushy and creamy. Our cottage cheese is more like cheese. It is soft and delicious.
Milk
In the video, we use 2% cow milk. Feel free to use any other type of cow milk – whole milk, 1 % or skim. Just note that there will be more cottage cheese if you use whole milk than if you use skim milk. Regular cow milk is a good source of calcium, vitamins A, B, and D, potassium, phosphorus, and others.
Please note that Amazon doesn’t have good options for milk unless you use Amazon Fresh. Hence, feel free to use the “Get Ingredients” button on our recipe to get more options for purchasing milk.
Yogurt
We use our homemade yogurt for this recipe. You can use store-bought whole yogurt. Just make sure the yogurt you purchase is plain (not vanilla or any other flavors). Also, using the whole yogurt may produce a better result than skim yogurt or other alternatives. Yogurt has so many health benefits that we dedicated an entire article touching on some of them (read here). The most important yogurt nutrients are probiotics, calcium, protein, vitamins, and minerals. If you can include yogurt in your daily diet, it would benefit your overall health.
Equipment for Cottage Cheese
You don’t need any special equipment to make cottage cheese at home. I use a strainer (sieve) to strain the liquid from the cottage cheese. If you don’t have a sieve, maybe you will have a slotted spoon. You can also use a straining cloth. Just use anything that will sift through the liquid and leave you with the yummy cottage cheese!
Cottage Cheese From Scratch
Equipment
Instructions
- Wash hands with soap and water. Check out our article about how to wash hands properly
- Gather all ingredients
- Pour 1 liter (about 4 cups) of milk into a pot.
- Turn the heat of the stove to medium
- Add 2 cups plain yogurt into the pot with milk
- While the milk gets heated you will notice that layer become to form. One of the liquid and one of the cottage cheese
- After boiling for 4-5 minutes, the liquid will no longer have white color and the cottage cheese would have formed. At that point, turn off the stove.
- Wait a few minutes for the liquid to cool off so you don't burn yourself.
- Strain the cottage cheese with a sieve. You can also slightly press the cottage cheese against the strainer to get rid of more liquid.
- Enjoy!
Video
Notes
- You can use whole milk, 2% milk, 1% milk, or even skim milk to make cottage cheese. However, the best results are with whole milk.
- Be careful not to burn the milk. Use medium or lower stove temperature.
- Wait for the milk to boil and the cottage cheese layer to form before taking the pot off the stove.
- When straining the cottage cheese, be careful not to burn yourself as the liquid will be hot.
Nutrition
We strive to provide the most accurate information possible, however, it is at your own risk when you decide to use it. For example, the nutritional information shown is an estimate provided by our recipe plugin. It should not be considered a substitute for a professional nutritionist’s advice. If we list a recipe as nut-free, for instance, we do our best to check all ingredients for nuts via an application. However, it is your responsibility to double-check our work before using the information as there is always room for manual error on our part or an error on the application we use.