Making Ricotta: Part One

  I have been collecting homemade ricotta recipes for a while (ok...since 2005...no quick decisions being made here...) but never got around to making it. I attribute my reluctance to tackle the recipes as part laziness and part confusion. The recipes I've collected vary so much. Some use only milk. Some use milk and buttermilk. Some use vinegar--some don't. Some say let the curds form for only 5 minutes and others say wait several hours. No one can tell me which technique is the best so I have decided to try three of them and see for myself.

This past weekend I decided to make the recipe from Donna Hay which required nothing more than whole milk and white vinegar. Armed with two quarts of Traders' Point milk and champagne vinegar, I took my first step into the world of home cheese making. The results were delicious.  My only disappointment was that the recipe said it would make 1 1/4 cups of ricotta and I got a mere scant 1/2 cup (can any home cheese making experts tell me what might have gone wrong here?).

With only a small portion of the ricotta, my visions of using it in any recipes such as baked ricotta, flew out the window. But if you can't fix it...feature it...So I decided to use the small amount I had for an appetizer--Robert grilled some crusty bread and we each created our own personal homage to the cheese--mine was sweet and his was savory. I spread my ricotta on the warm bread, topped it with a generous drizzle of local honey and scattered some chopped pistachios on it. Robert choose to rub his bread with a raw garlic clove, brushed on a little bit of olive oil, and then spread the ricotta on top of the bread. Both versions were wonderful.

Next weekend I'm trying the ricotta recipe that calls for buttermilk and milk. Will let you know...in the meantime, here's Donna Hay's recipe.

Ricotta

6 cups full cream milk
2 tablespoons white vinegar

1. Place the milk and a candy thermometer in a saucepan over medium heat and heat to 176ºF. Remove from the heat, add the vinegar and allow to sit for 5 minutes or until curds form.
2. Line a colander with fine muslin and place over a deep bowl. Use a slotted spoon to carefully spoon the curds into the colander. Do not pour them in from the saucepan--the curds will break if you do this. Allow to drain for 5 minutes.
3. Gently spoon the ricotta into a glass or ceramic dish and loosely cover with plastic wrap. Store in refrigerator for up to 1 week. Makes 1 ¼ cups.

Photo: Ricotta made using Donna Hay's recipe

Comments

[tmc]

yum! I've never made ricotta but I make yogurt cheese quite often. I like the freshness and ability to control the ingredients when it's made at home.

Good for you for jumping into that recipe collection! :)

[maggie]

I've made ricotta at home several times, and this covers the total of my ricotta wisdom. First, you probably didn't heat the milk enough. Whenever I make ricotta, I heat the milk to 200 degrees, then add the acid and let it heat for about a minute more until the curds begin to form. Then I let it sit until it cools before straining it. It helps to hit it a few times with a whisk as it's cooling to keep the curds nice and small. You may not have had enough milk. Each gallon of milk should make about a pound of cheese, give or take a bit. I don't know the weight of the cheese I get, but I usually get about a pint of cheese from each gallon of 2% milk. You also may not have had a fine enough cheese cloth. The curds are tiny and you need a really fine mesh to strain them through or else most go down the drain. Though I've never tried used unhomogenized milk, I think this may have been part of the problem. The cheese forms from the proteins in the milk reacting with the acid and not so much from the fatty cream. This is why you can usually add acidic things like wine and lemon juice to cream in recipes but not milk. I would highly suggest separating the thick cream off the top of that Trader's Point milk before making the cheese and then mixing it back in after the cheese is done to give it extra creaminess and richness. Otherwise, all that creamy goodness could end up in the drain. Also, I find that if you can pour slowly and carefully enough, there is very little loss from pouring the curds and whey through the mesh. Trying to scoop the curds out of the liquid would probably be harder and leave a lot of good curd behind. If you still want to spoon the mixture into the strainer, I would try a soup ladle instead of a slotted spoon, so you can capture all those tiny curds. Hope that helps and doesn't just confuse things more.