Cottage Cheese Custard with Mango Orange Marmalade

Making custard has been on my regular rotation for many years. My family and guests have it for breakfast or dessert and everyone thinks it is special. Like making my ice cream, custard is so quick to get in the oven that I make it sometimes three times a week. I experimenting with making it once in awhile coming up with different combinations. My inspiration for this custard was me wanting more calcium and protein from it than my normal custard. My normal custard I use just 4 yolks and two cups of raw milk. This custard I added a cup of cottage cheese to the mix and two of egg whites, which amounts to twenty extra grams of protein.

Before talking about the recipe I want to talk about cottage cheese. It isn’t without it’s problems. If you are lucky to find one without all of the gums, thickeners and other things that are a shame to be there, there is still the lactic acid to deal with. Lactic acid is not good. It causes inflammation in the body and actually is something nice for cancer to enjoy. The more tangy the cottage cheese is the higher the lactic acid content is. Ray Peat would rinse his and just eat the curds. I tried rinsing it and it just didn’t seem worth eating cottage cheese. I did experiment with a method that someone suggested for yogurt and it makes a nice cottage cheese with lots of lactic acid removed. When I bring the cottage cheese home from the market I put it in a coffee filter, that is in a sieve over a bowl, cover it and put it in the refrigerator for a couple of days. I replace the coffee filter with a new one after one day to soak up more faster. A lot drains into the bowl in those two days, and I like the texture and taste much better. This is the cottage cheese I am using in this custard, a firmer less tangy one. It is worth doing this with cottage cheese not just for this recipe and good health, but I am finding many uses for it as well, which I will be posting about in the future, so you may as well start getting use to this idea.

To start this custard preheat the oven to 325-degrees and put the rack in the center of the oven. In a blender add one cup of this strained cottage cheese, two cups of milk, a half cup of white sugar, one tablespoon of vanilla extract, 1/8 teaspoon salt, two whole eggs and two egg yolks. Blend it up for about 10 seconds and pour into four baking dishes. Place those baking dishes in another bigger pan and fill with water halfway up the dishes. I sprinkled on some fresh nutmeg, but you could use cinnamon or nothing more. Place this pan in the oven and bake for 40 minutes. Take the pan out of the oven and let the custards cool for about ten minutes before removing them from the water. Let cool completely before refrigerating. You can eat this all by itself, or with a little maple syrup or like I did with this bright fruity marmalade I made. I just made my regular orange marmalade recipe and added half of a fresh mango to the batch. Boy what a bright difference that made!