A guide to soft fresh cheeses: cottage cheese, ricotta and more
Soft, fresh cheeses are milky and moist, created to be eaten not long after they are made. The differences among them are like shades of white to an interior designer, subtle but distinct; some versions work better in certain applications than others. Variations come with the strains of bacteria a cheesemaker selects, along with fat content, pasteurization, salt and time. But the process is basically the same: Milk is fermented by lactic acid bacteria or curdled by heat or acid from a souring agent like lemon juice or vinegar. Sometimes rennet is added to speed up the process.
COTTAGE CHEESE
A soft, creamy cheese, this starts with milk proteins that have been turned into curds and separated from the watery whey. The curds are washed to get rid of any remaining acid, so the cheese tastes mild or even slightly sweet. Curd size depends on the cheesemaker’s style. Cottage cheese is made entirely out of skim milk until the end, when a dressing made from cream or milk is mixed with the curd. Fat content, which can be as high as 4 percent, comes from the dressing.
FARMER’S CHEESE
Essentially cottage cheese before it has been dressed, farmer’s cheese is sometimes hung in cheesecloth or pressed to make a crumbly but solid mass; the American style is salted. Different nations have different versions, like the slightly spongy Mexican queso fresco (which can be salted or not), or the Indian chenna, which is more like dry cottage cheese, and paneer, which is chenna that is pressed and easily cut into cubes. (Neither Indian cheese is salted.)
QUARK
Whether this is essentially a version of low-fat cottage cheese, farmer’s cheese, a thick sister to yogurt or its own thing depends on which country you live in. In Germany, quark is thick and smooth like yogurt, but slightly drier. Israel has both a creamy style and something drier and more akin to pressed, dry cottage cheese. In Russia and Poland, quark is sold as soft, pressed cakes of curds that are often broken up and mixed with other dairy products for blintzes, pierogi fillings or dips. Its Italian name is giuncata.
POT CHEESE
This is somewhere between cottage cheese and farmer’s cheese in dryness. The name is a reference to a style of cheese easily made in a pot on top of a stove. It is sometimes sold as “dry-curd cottage cheese.”
RICOTTA
The lighter, fluffier, finer cousin of cottage cheese. The key difference: It’s made primarily from the protein-laden whey left over from making cheese, though some milk may be added to increase yield. Of the cheeses listed here, it is the only one that is cooked curd, coagulated by heat and aided by the addition of acid, thus it takes its name from the Italian word for recooked.
MASCARPONE
Sometimes called Italian cream cheese, mascarpone is a specialty of Lombardy, Italy. It’s made by adding acid to heavy cream. It’s smooth, rich, fatty and just the slightest bit sweet. Think of it as whipped cream without the air.
CREAM CHEESE
Although creamy like mascarpone, it has less fat, is firmer and gets a slight tang from lactic acid bacteria. It is decidedly American, created in the late 1800s, when a New York maker of the milk-based, French-style cheese called Neufchâtel added cream to the process. There’s a variant, popular in France and Italy, called Petit Suisse.
FROMAGE BLANC
A smooth French soft cheese, this is even thicker than creme fraiche, which is technically cultured cream, with a bit more tang. French legislation requires that fromage blanc have no live cultures, unlike fromage frais.