Homemade Cream Cheese
This homemade cream cheese is so simple to make and can be used for all your sweet and savory recipes. It's so much creamier, tastier and more cost-effective than any store-bought version.
Servings: 1 cup
Calories: 734kcal
Equipment
- 1 cheesecloth (or paper towels)
- 1 mesh strainer, optional
Ingredients
- 4 cups whole milk
- ¼ cup white vinegar or lemon juice (see Note 2)
- 2-3 tbsp cream (any percentage is great or you can even use more milk)
- Salt, to taste, optional (see Note 3)
Instructions
- Add the milk to a medium saucepan and place over LOW heat
- Bring the milk to a very low simmer, stirring occasionally; don't let it boil (see Note 4)
- Turn off the heat, but don't take the saucepan off the stove yet
- Slowly pour in the vinegar or lemon juice, stirring the milk as you pour (it's going to curdle and separate right away, that's exactly what you want)
- Remove the saucepan from the heat and let it stand for 10-15 minutes to cool down a little and finish curdling
- Line a strainer with cheesecloth or paper towel and pour in the contents of the saucepan to drain the whey (see Note 5)
- As soon as the ricotta finishes draining, transfer it to a high-powered hand blender or an immersion blender cup (my preferred method)
- Add 1 tablespoon of cream and blend
- Once it becomes too difficult to blend, add another tablespoon of cream and continue blending until smooth, adding more cream if necessary
- Optionally add salt to taste (see Note 3)
- Use the cream cheese as a spread for bagels or sandwiches, or use it in any sweet or savory recipe
Notes
1. This recipe uses my recipe for ricotta cheese as a base. Find it here.
2. I prefer to use white vinegar as the acid for this recipe as it gives a more neutral taste to the cream cheese. Lemon juice works great as well, but will give the cream cheese a slight lemon flavor.
3. Salt is totally optional in this recipe; because I use this cream cheese in both sweet and savory recipes, I typically skip don’t add any salt to the plain cream cheese and just add it later based on the recipe I’m using it for.
4. I stop when I see small bubbles all over the milk; if you prefer to check the temperature it should be around 200℉/92℃ and it will have the distinct sweet smell of warm milk.
5. If you don’t have a strainer or sieve, you can just place the cheesecloth or paper towels on a large plate then scoop the curds onto the plate, wrap it all up and squeeze the whey out with your hands.
Nutrition
Calories: 734kcal | Carbohydrates: 49g | Protein: 35g | Fat: 44g | Saturated Fat: 26g | Polyunsaturated Fat: 2g | Monounsaturated Fat: 10g | Cholesterol: 158mg | Sodium: 401mg | Potassium: 1577mg | Sugar: 51g | Vitamin A: 2118IU | Vitamin C: 0.2mg | Calcium: 1293mg | Iron: 0.1mg