Homemade melted cheese from cottage cheese

Homemade melted cheese from cottage cheese turns out creamy, soft, and works well for keto breakfasts, snacks, and spreads. The key is to use good cottage cheese and blend the base until fully smooth so no grains remain in the finished cheese.

Put cottage cheese 9% fat (500 g) into a heavy-bottomed saucepan. Add egg (100 g), salt (4 g), and citric acid (1 g). Blend with an immersion blender until you get a completely smooth paste-like mass without lumps.

If the cottage cheese is too dry, coarse, or poorly made, the mixture may melt worse and stay grainy for longer. For this recipe, it is better to use fresh good-quality cottage cheese without extra additives and with normal fat content rather than a random over-dry product.

Add room-temperature butter (100 g) and blend again until smooth. If you do not have a heavy-bottomed saucepan, cook the cheese over a water bath.

Place the pan over low heat and warm the mixture, stirring constantly with a spatula. When the cottage cheese mixture starts to melt and becomes more fluid, add baking soda (4 g).

Keep stirring constantly and cook for another 3-5 minutes until the cheese becomes smooth, stretchy, and even. If the mass still refuses to melt properly and stays rough midway through cooking, the reason is usually the cottage cheese quality rather than the method itself. In that case you can carefully blend the hot mass once more and continue warming it over low heat, but poor cottage cheese will not become perfect.

Transfer the hot cheese into clean dry containers or glass jars with lids. If you like, immediately fold in finely chopped herbs with garlic, mushrooms fried with onion, or small cubes of cooked bacon, roasted pork, or another ready-to-eat meat.

Add the fillings right after cooking while the cheese is still hot and pliable. If you want several flavors, divide the cheese into portions and mix about 100 g of ready filling into each part. For the mushroom version, first evaporate the moisture from the mushrooms, then fry them with onion and let the filling cool slightly so it does not thin the cheese.

Cool the cheese and refrigerate it. After chilling, it will become firmer. Store the homemade melted cheese in the refrigerator for up to 7 days.