Carol likes cottage cheese and I recently spotted a recipe for Classic Cottage Cheese in Claudia Lucero’s cookbook One-Hour Cheese and decided to make a batch.  Cottage cheese is the epitome of the kind of food that in the past ordinary people routinely made whereas modern people always buy.  (In other words, how hard could this be?)

It turned out very well and in fact took only about an hour.  I have a lot of cheesemaking equipment, but the only thing I needed which most people would not have is rennet to coagulate the milk.

I am not here going to describe the whole process, but I did want to record the quantities of ingredients I used.  The only thing unusual in the ingredient list is the buttermilk to give the final product a tang and a creamy texture.  A batch makes about 1.5 lbs. of cottage cheese.

1.25 cups cultured full-fat buttermilk, divided

¼ tsp. liquid rennet (or ¼ tablet)

½ cup distilled water (or other non-chlorinated water)

1 gallon whole milk (not ultra pasteurized)

½ tsp. (~4g.) cheese salt