Quickest, and safest way, to bring milk to boil

Question

So I made homemade cottage cheese yesterday that had me cook the milk until it was just about to boil. I had it on the stove for at least half an hour because I didn't want it to start boiling the one time I looked away. This got me wondering if anyone has any 'tricks' to bring milk to a boil quick(er) and safely?

Answer 1

I put the pan with the milk inside a larger pan containing some water. This makes it much harder for the milk to boil; but it doesn't need to boil in order to turn for cottage cheese. It takes much longer to turn this way (1-2 hours), but during that time I can pretty much leave it alone and just check back every 5-10 minutes to see if it's started to turn yet and give it a quick stir to break up the skin.

Answer 2

If your purpose is just to boil milk quicker and safely. Then I'd suggest using a pot with a larger surface. This will mean your milk is shallower and thus boils quicker. It's as safe as what you're doing currently, but since it boils faster you'll need to watch it much closer.

Keep in mind that with this method, since the milk will have a greater surface area exposed to the air, then it will evaporate much more rapidly. This may require you to adjust the amount of milk you are boiling slightly.

If you're going to be adding additional ingredients to the milk for a perhaps more complex recipe in the same pot, then this may not be a useful approach. e.g. if you were to need to boil something in the milk for X number of minutes this would fail, because you would likely boil away too much of your milk in the time the item needed to cook