There’s something about raw milk. For many of us, it was the first step in the real food journey. It tastes weird at first, like drinking ice cream. Then you grow to love it — especially the kids, then depend on it. Then it’s at every meal. And then…
THEN you find out the stuff never goes bad, really, it just sorta becomes another food. We found this startling. All our lives, we’d been warned about eating a food past its expiration date.
Except maybe a Goldfish®, which lasts forever. (Why didn’t THAT amaze us?) These days, we are getting 4 brand new foods out of what we used to call “spoiled” milk, starting with homemade cottage cheese.
A little backstory on how this non-cook got to making cottage cheese, which led to the other 3 foods. You’ve heard of the Budwig diet for healing cancer, yes? It’s main component is FOCC eaten twice a day, once in the am and once late afternoon. FOCC = Flaxseed Oil and lowfat Cottage Cheese, all organic. Well, I’m on the diet. I don’t have cancer, I have other issues 🙂 I explain all in an upcoming post focusing on the protocol.
I’m WILD about the FOCC. Not only delicious, but it alone heals cancer (scroll down to the video under “About”). And, while it alone might not heal everything, it certainly helps one along the path because of the way it affects cells.
So I’m on this diet that has me eating 6 Tbsp of FO blended into 12 Tbsp of CC everyday (half am, half pm). That’s 84T of cottage cheese a week, roughly 5.25 containers. I was eating Nancy’s Organic Cultured Cottage Cheese which is delicious, btw, no additives and Non-GMO Project verified.
At the same time, I get this clean, delicious, A2 raw milk every Saturday. (So clean, I’ve had jars last me 4 weeks. That’s clean raw milk!)
Then I accidentally left a jar out for two days. If you saw my kitchen, you’d see how that could happen. The milk wasn’t bad, just too far gone to drink. I knew that spoiled milk was the first step to making cottage cheese, so thought I’d try. “How hard could it be?” I asked myself. Usually that’s my prelude to certain disaster. Not this time! It is truly so simple.
How to Make Homemade Cottage Cheese from Raw Milk
Yield: 4 C homemade cottage cheese and 1/2 gallon of whey
INGREDIENTS
- 1 gallon raw milk
EQUIPMENT
- 1 container to hold the cream, at least 2 cups
- 1 ladle or dipper
- 1 large nut bag for straining (I love this one from Amazon, $11.60)
- 1 large bowl to catch the whey
- 1 container to store the cottage cheese
- 1/2 gallon Ball jar to store the whey
INSTRUCTIONS – Please read all the way through before starting.
STEP ONE You want to take most of the cream off the top of the milk, leaving a thin layer, like 1/4 to 1/2 inch. If you take too much off, the milk takes much longer to curdle.
We get our milk in Ball jars and I found a small ladle that just fits inside the opening. If your milk doesn’t come in Ball jars, pour it into a similar container with a wide mouth. Loosen the top and let the milk sit out for at least a day — my last batch sat out 3 days which was perfect in this weather. The cream settles at the top and “gels” (cultures) so it’s much easier to remove.
In the picture below, the cream has been removed from the two jars on the left and put in the quart jar on the right. I’m just getting ready to remove the cultured cream on the top of the middle jar.
Save that cream, it’s all ready to make cultured butter! Go ahead and put the cream in the fridge.
STEP TWO Cover the skimmed milk lightly (I leave the cap barely screwed on) and leave on the counter till it separates: whey in the bottom, curdled milk solids in the top. It won’t curdle if it’s not warm enough, so it needs to be in a warmish spot.
STEP THREE Once it’s separated, strain the whey out. I use a cotton bag hung on a cup hook over a glass bowl. If you don’t have a nut bag, you can use an old piece of cotton sheet. Cut a big square, tie the four corners up in a knot, hang from the hook and pour the separated milk in there. Straining usually takes 4 hours or so. You can let it sit overnight, then add some whey or milk back in if it gets too dry.
Presto! Homemade cottage cheese! Both the whey and CC get stored in the fridge.
Yes, it’s that easy! I use all my homemade cottage cheese in the FOCC, but it’s delicious with tomatoes and peppers, or in any recipe calling for cottage cheese. It’s great on buttermilk pancakes, or as a base for a dip or a soup… Homemade raw milk cottage cheese is an all-around nutritious, versatile, nutrient-dense food. We LOVE having it on hand.
Btw, do not use this method with pasteurized milk, it won’t work. Check out youtube for how-tos on that!
And having fresh whey around is so useful! It can last 6 months in a cold fridge (although you probably won’t have it that long). Here’s how I use it:
- Ferments – use it in beet kvass, sauerkraut and other homemade ferments
- Smoothies (add to anything that needs a liquid thinner or healthful boost)
- Cooking — use as a soup base, to cook oatmeal, rice, pastas, use as the liquid in breadmaking, muffins, pancakes, use for soaking grains, add a little to picnic salads (potato, pasta)… Just consider using whey anytime a recipe calls for water!
- Mayo — my NT cookbook (available on Amazon, see picture below) mayo recipe calls for whey, fantastic and so easy! They whey makes it last longer. We eat that so fast, we usually don’t bother to refrigerate. (Mayo recipe tip: instead of mustard, add a little curry powder — OMG, you’ll put it on everything!!!)
- Pet food — chickens, pigs and dogs love it, my cats not so much, although others say their cats go for it
- Plants/garden — water your plants with it, tomatoes love it, may need to dilute for sensitive plants like lettuces, peppers
- Freeze — freeze in ice cube trays, then store in a baggie or container for later use
Ok, that’s TWO nutrient dense versatile foods from one gallon of raw milk!
But, wait, there’s more! What about all that yummy left-over cream? My herdshare cows give me a cup of cream in every half gallon. When we’re just drinking the milk, we shake up that goodness before drinking. But the slightly curdled cream leftover from the cottage cheese-making is PERFECT for butter and just as simple to make.
The very next post tells how to make raw milk butter and buttermilk from this yummy cream. Don’t worry, it will keep 🙂
In the meantime, do you make homemade cottage cheese and whey? Please share your tips and tricks with us below — thank you!
that sounds yummy! we only get 2 gal a week tho’ on fri or sat and its gone by wed – and we are just drinking it! well, i use it for a couple blueberry smoothies but yeh. is 2 gal for 2 ppl that last 4-5 days bad? lol. we used to get 3 gal but… budget cuts. i’ll have to try this sometime tho’.
Hal doesn’t drink it but Mo and I do plus the cottage cheese, etc. We are getting 4 gal a week right now but I’m eating a ton of CC. It’s a good food… we are practically purists around here now!!!
Hi,
Please do not use low fat milk in your cottage cheese.
According to Dr. Budwigs books, she did not recommend low fat foods. You need the fat.
Best regards, Linda
Hi Linda, thank you for your comment — as a Weston A Price Foundation chapter leader, I’m on the full-fat bandwagon!!!
My instinct is to agree with you! For now, however, I’m sticking with the lowfat cottage cheese on the JB diet just because that is what is recommended by the purists on the yahoo group. I just went back and read every thread I could find on the topic. Some people say it doesn’t matter the fat content and my instinct is to go with that…
Then Sandra points out that, while Dr. Budwig said the low-fat craze advocated by the USDA was backwards and we should be eating plenty of good fats, Sandra doesn’t believe JB meant that for the cottage cheese in the FOCC. I don’t know, so I’m going with the group recommendations. As they like to point out, it’s worked for years with the lowfat CC.
I’m not a scientist, but I figure I get so much good fat in the FO twice a day, plus eating full-fat cheese, flaxseed oil in my salad dressing, freshly ground flax seeds 3x a day, snacking on nuts (walnuts and almonds mostly) and at least an avocado a day that I’m safe from anyone accusing me of promoting a lowfat diet!
Besides… then I wouldn’t get the butter! 🙂
* Oops, realized I was typing my intial comment on the wrong page – please go ahead and delete that one. I am reposting it on the write page, and posting my question for this page here 🙂
This is such a wonderful blog 🙂 Thank you for this entry! Have started on the FOCC Budwig plan, myself, but am tired of being unable to find a proper organic cottage cheese where I live; doubly curious as to why raw cottage cheese isn’t a thing sold, but am happy to be able to make it at home now that I know now. Do you, by chance, know what the nutritional stats for such would be?
You said that you eat 12tbsp of CC for this mixture, a day. May I ask how you fit that into your general food schedule or menu plan? I’ve seen it said elsewhere that a general maintenance dose for those who don’t have or used to have cancer, is 2tbsp CC/1tbsp FO, but I like the idea of eating more, too, as a preventative. With it, though, I’d like to also adopt a Mediterranean eating plan, which recommends about 5tbsp of olive oil a day, sans any type of Budwig addition.
So, I’m curious as to how such a combined diet would fare the body with 11 tbsps of oil a day (weight gain? vitamin/mineral storage?), as well as how many calories you’d recommend bottoming out at daily, for someone about 125 pounds. For your eating habits, for example, do you mainly just eat the Bugwig meals and a salad for lunch, with some juicing, etc? Or do you incorporate a wider range of foods with it?
Thank you for your help 🙂
Hi Kati, no worries on the questions and posts, I do the same thing when I’m hot on a topic 🙂
I use the nutritional stats at http://nutritiondata.self.com/. It’s all somewhat flawed data and no one has done it for raw as opposed to pasteurized so I go with it. I figure it’s gotta be close.
I don’t think raw is sold because a) it’s not legal so many places and b) it would be pretty pricey to make in small quantities, like raw butter or yogurt. when I don’t have raw, I cheat with Daisy — I wrote to the company and they really just have the 2 ingredients in it so when I’m out of raw, that’s what I do. If I had cancer, I would always have raw or organic!
My husband and I share the 12T so that’s 6 each like the recipe calls for. It’s a nice serving but sometimes we do smaller servings.
5T of olive oil is about 500 calories a day. My weight loss macros are 1500 calories a day max so I’d have a hard time fitting all that in and staying on my weight loss plan. It REALLY depends on your metabolism. If you take in more calories than you burn, you’ll gain weight. You just have to watch and plan around that.
The Med diet is so healthy! I’d switch out some flax oil for the olive but otherwise, I could live on that. I’m doing keto (high fat/protein, low carb) and feel really good on that. The Med diet fits right in there!
I incorporate all foods. I don’t juice though — eat your calories, don’t drink them is a good rule of thumb for managing weight (which is what I’m doing now). In juicing, you usually just get the carbs and very little of the fiber. NOW if I had cancer? I’d follow the Budwig religiously. http://www.anticancermom.com/ is where I learned the most about Budwig (until I found the yahoo group). She’d be my go-to.
Got other questions? Please don’t hesitate to ask 🙂
Actually, also curious – what’s the bucket hanging next to your stove? Trying to get the picture bigger, in case it helps provide weight to hold up the cottage cheese and allow it to drip, as I don’t have anything set up to do something like this, and love the idea of having it in the kitchen like that. Apologies for all the questions! 🙂
I had to come look at the bucket, lol. That was the compost bucket but we’ve since moved it. Trying every which way to keep the ants out of the compost! Now we have it on the center island that has 4 legs. Each leg is in a small bowl with diatomaceous earth in it. Ants don’t make it thru that!
Hi Sally,
Thank you so, so much for your feedback here and on the Curcumin page (cocoa powder and butter sounds so yummy!) 🙂 Thank you, too, for the great tips, especially with the diatomaceous earth! Been thinking about trying that, as well as working towards regular composting, so your mentioning it has encouraged me.
The weight I mentioned is a goal weight, but I have a long ways to go to that; was just curious about it for when I eventually do reach it. And having experienced some sudden and strange symptoms over the past few months, as well as losing a very close family member from cancer this year (whom I accompanied daily at the hospital before it happened; so I completely relate to that lack of desire to ever end up in such a place again), I’ve been pretty paranoid about my own health and trying to do what I can to learn more about prevention, from doing things like switching from plastics in the house to glass, porcelain, and other alternatives, to researching all-natural bedding, emf, and adding some dosage of FOCC to my menu daily.
Also, if interested in the Mediterranean diet, have you heard of Elena Paravantes? She has a great site giving numerous,authentically Greek recipes and methods for how to switch over. I’m so grateful there are people like you both who have created such invaluable sources of information to help others, and I appreciate the link you shared; I will check that out soon!
Here’s to good health, to you and your readers (of which I’m happily a new one)!
I hope you have a wonderful day, and thank you again. 🙂