Choosing cottage cheese: 3 signs of quality cottage cheese
1. White with cream. A good cottage cheese is white with a creamy (not bluish) shade. Moreover, it should smell like cottage cheese – do you remember this wonderful, slightly sour (but not too) smell?
2. Not sour. Good curd is never sour. The best fresh cottage cheese is the one to which you do not need to add sugar or jam. It is delicious and sweet on its own.
3. Uniformly bold. The cottage cheese should be fatty, slightly oily and homogeneous: it is bad if it consists of several layers that differ from each other in color and consistency. That is why you should be very careful about traders selling cottage cheese in large barrels and tubs: they collect it for several days and only then bring it to the market. Inside such a tub, the curd may be slightly sour or even spoiled.
If the cottage cheese is lumpy, grainy, crumbly, this means that it was squeezed out to the last, pulled out all the moisture from it. It is lighter than oily, that is, when you buy it by volume, it will turn out to be larger, moreover, such cottage cheese does not deteriorate longer. However, it is dry and not too tasty, and besides, it will be almost impossible to get rid of these lumps during the cooking process. In order, for example, to cook Easter from such cottage cheese, it must be wiped for a very long time through a sieve, since you will not be able to get rid of small lumps with a mixer or blender.
You can, of course, buy cottage cheese in the store, but homemade cottage cheese is always better, you cook it yourself from the highest quality milk.