Part 3 of 3 — A series on the fresh cheeses on American grocery shelves
Over the last two posts we walked through the seven names crowding the fresh-cheese aisle: quark, túró, twaróg, cottage cream, fromage blanc, farmer cheese, cottage cheese and showed that there are really only four cheeses underneath them. We sorted them by texture, tang, intended function, and discussed the protein numbers highlighted on the labels.
That leaves a question we haven’t fully answered: why do we still make farm cheese?
There are a few reasons, and they’re all related.
It’s an ingredient, not a snack
Farm cheese has lower fat than cream cheese, which means added flavors come through cleanly instead of getting muffled. Garlic and herbs read sharply. Lemon zest cuts. Honey doesn’t disappear. Bakeries reach for Farm Cheese when they need a fresh dairy base that will perform as directed when: folded into pancake batter for syrniki, layered into cheesecake, stuffed into pierogi and blintzes, used in place of ricotta in lasagna and stuffed shells.
The other fresh cheeses on the shelf can be cooked with. Fromage blanc certainly can, quark can in a pinch, but farm cheese is the only one in the group designed for it from the start. Drained until firm. Cohesive enough to hold its shape in a filling. Tangy enough to balance sweet applications without turning sour. That’s not an accident; that’s a few centuries of Eastern European and Jewish-American cooks figuring out exactly what they wanted in a cheese.
The fat in it is doing real work
The fresh cheeses that win the protein-per-ounce race we talked about in Part 2 get there through some combination of removing fat, draining more aggressively, adding isolated milk proteins, or starting with ultrafiltered milk. Each one of those moves changes how the cheese behaves during cooking. How it browns, how it carries flavor, and how it feels in your mouth. None of those moves is part of how Farm Cheese is made.
Dairy nutrition conversations have shifted noticeably over the last decade. The old assumption that removing fat automatically improves dairy hasn’t held up well in recent research. Instead, there’s growing interest in what milk fat itself contributes. We’re not making any health claims here. The point is just that for Farm Cheese, we don’t engineer the fat out. The fat is part of what makes this cheese taste like cheese, and behave like cheese in a recipe.
The ingredient list is genuinely short
Pasteurized cow’s milk from local Michigan farms, cultures, microbial enzymes, salt. Four ingredients, all of them traditional to cheesemaking: milk to start, cultures to ferment, microbial enzymes to coagulate, salt for flavor and to help draw out moisture.
Next time you’re in the dairy aisle, check the back label on a flavored fresh cheese. The ingredient lists in that category section often contain seven, eight, nine items. Stabilizers like fruit pectin or carob bean gum, sweeteners, natural flavors, juice concentrates added for color, alongside the milk and cultures themselves.
That’s not a knock on those products. Selling a smooth, spoonable, pretty cheese that has to look the same on day one as on day twenty often requires most of those things. A drained curd cheese doesn’t try to be smooth and pourable in the first place, so it doesn’t need any of them. It’s the same recipe whether it ships in a cup or a 10-pound bucket. And our four-ingredient list still gets us a 10-week shelf life in a sealed cup, sitting on the same grocery shelf as products with much longer ingredient panels.
We didn’t choose to leave things out. Farm Cheese itself doesn’t need them.
What to actually do with it
If you’ve never cooked with farm cheese before, three places to start:
As a stand-in for ricotta — in lasagna, stuffed shells, baked ziti, or any stuffed pasta. It’s drier and tangier than ricotta, which means it doesn’t water out and turn the bottom of your baking dish soupy.
As a cheesecake base. The traditional Eastern European cheesecake, which has a dense, slightly tangy filling, is built on farm cheese. It bakes up firmer and tastes brighter.
As a 30-second savory spread. Fork-mash a few tablespoons with olive oil, lemon juice, a small clove of garlic, salt, pepper, and whatever fresh herbs you have. Spread on toast. That’s lunch.
If you want to go further, syrniki, Russian and Ukrainian farmer-cheese pancakes, are the gateway recipe. Mix farm cheese with an egg, a bit of flour, a little sugar, and pan-fry small patties in butter. Top with sour cream and jam. They’re a revelation, and they take about fifteen minutes.
One more thing
Names will keep changing. Marketing will keep finding new ways to describe centuries-old food. Underneath all of it, a fresh cheese made from cow’s milk and cultures, drained until firm, has been what it’s been for a long time.
That’s what we make. And that’s why we still make it the way we do.
Sanilac Creamery is the maker of Zingerman’s Farm Cheese which is available in cups at local retailers and for wholesale through Faire.com, and in 5- and 10-pound buckets for restaurants and bakeries.
This is Part 3 of a three-part series. Part 1: A Field Guide to the Fresh Cheeses Crowding Your Dairy Case Part 2: What These Fresh Cheeses Are Actually For — and the Truth About the Protein Numbers
by Arend Elston