Ricotta from Scratch

Hi. and welcome. I am pretty excited about beginning this project, and I want to thank anyone who looks in. As you might have already guessed, this blog is mainly about food, vegetarian food that my family and I prepare here at home in our kitchen. We prepare practically everything from scratch, on the lowest budget we can manage, and approach our practice of cooking passionately.

I am writing this primarily because I will enjoy the process, and to establish for myself and members of my family a record of the recipes and techniques we develop, but also, because I want to share my love of food with you. Please feel free to respond to anything that appears here, and if you have any questions at all, feel free. I will do my best to answer them.

This is the first entry in my first blog, so I will be learning as I go along, and eventually, I hope, you will find Scratch Vegetarian a comfortably polished place to visit, especially, if like me, you sometimes take as much pleasure in reading a good cook book, as you do in reading a good novel.


Ricotta from Scratch

Oh yeah, Ricotta. I love it. We'll talk about lasagna down the road. We bake it twenty pounds at a time, but we also use our ricotta in calzone, on pizza, in cheesecakes, and in other ethnic venues; for enchiladas perhaps, or pressed into a firmer cheese, as paneer, for example, to be used in many East Indian dishes. What we don't like about ricotta is the junk they stick into the store-bought varieties, the lack of freshness of the store-bought varieties, and the COST of the store-bought varieties.

At the moment, milk is on sale in almost every store I visit. Be sure to buy the no rBST milk! And now if you follow this simple recipe, you will produce about one quart of very nice ricotta cheese for between twenty and twenty-five percent of what you would need to pay for the commercial variety. By the way, my oldest son and I have been working out this recipe for some time now, so he deserves at least half the credit.

Ingredients:

one gallon whole milk
two, to four lemons or,
1/4 to 1/2 cup white vinegar
whole nutmeg for grating
salt
1/4 to 1/2 cup cream

You noticed my measurements are a little on the vague side? Let's face it. If you want to cook wonderful food, you need to taste it with your tongue, touch it with your fingertips, smell it with your nose and watch it, watch it, watch it with your eyes. We face variations like seasonal temperatures, altitudes, freshness, or quality of ingredients, electric vs gas, to say nothing of differences in personal taste, so I don't even think of following any recipe as if it was some kind of revealed wisdom never to be questioned. I approach the process watchfully, and test constantly.

Put a couple of inches of water in a large soup pot. Bring this to a boil. Place a large, oven-proof bowl on the pot, over the water, one that will comfortably hold your gallon of milk. I sometimes use a pyrex bowl, but I prefer a big stainless steel one that can hold two gallons at a time.

Pour your milk into the bowl and let the milk get hot enough that a skin forms on the surface. At this temperature, when you stick the tip of your finger into the bowl, you really know it's hot!

Now to choose between the lemon juice or the vinegar. Lemon juice imparts a lovely flavor to the cheese, especially nice for use in desserts, and pretty much the rule when taking this process a step further and making paneer for Indian dishes, but for Italian style ricotta cheese, I prefer plain white vinegar.

Pour 1/4 cup vinegar, or the juice of two lemons into the milk and stir briefly with a long-handled spoon. Now watch and wait a few minutes. You want to see the milk curds separating from the whey. In a short time you should see the thick white curds gathering on the surface and the whey should have the appearance of a cloudy yellowish liquid with just a slight cast of green. The clearer the whey, the more substantial the curds. If ,after a few minutes, you have only gotten a few curds and the liquid in your bowl is still very opaque and milky in appearance, add the remainder of your acid, whether lemon juice or vinegar, and stir again. This should definitely do the trick, but always have an extra lemon on hand, just in case.

When the curds and whey are well separated, check that the level of water in your pot is sufficient, and let the curds cook for fifteen or twenty minutes longer. This waiting time lets the acid do its work and results in a little more cheese. Now remove the bowl from the pot and set aside to cool for a while. My son found that doing this lets the cheese set into a more manageable consistency.

When the whey is closer to warm than hot, you can strain the whey off the curds through a sieve. You don't need a super fine sieve, and you don't need cheese cloth. You might lose a tablespoon of cheese by foregoing the cheese cloth, but in my experience, cheese cloth costs more than a tablespoon of curds.

If you strain the whey into a clean container, you can reserve it for use in another recipe, or as a substitute for water in most soup stocks. It is very nutritious, so why not? Use a rubber spatula to scrape any easily removable milk solids from the sides of the bowl, and add this to the curds.

Now press the curds with the back of a spoon, until they are moist, but not to the point that they are practically dry. This is not at all critical, and with practice you will discover what level of moisture is comfortable for you.

Shake the curds out of the sieve back into the bowl and rinse that sieve! Curds dry stickily. Add 1/4 cup cream to the curds. Stir briskly. I use a wire whisk at this point. You want your ricotta fluffy and spreadable, not clumpy, but at the same time, you don't want it so wet that it sheds cream. This goes back to how dry you pressed it earlier. No worries. It's all fixable. If you find it too dry, add a bit more cream. If too wet, return it to the sieve and press out a bit more of the whey. The addition of cream isn't actually necessary, but we have found that in the process of stirring, the cream binds the curds well into a spreadable mass. My son sometimes adds an egg yolk or two as a further binding agent, and to add firmness in a recipe where the ricotta stands more on its own as in, for example, a stuffed pasta recipe.

This is a simple farmer's cheese. In fact in terms of cheese, I don't imagine there is one simpler. Wrapped in cloth and pressed between a couple of plates and under a heavy weight for a few hours it becomes paneer in India, and in Mexico, a fresh queso blanco. Less fluffy, and more clumpy, with more whey (and cream is still very good) it is cottage cheese. It knows no ethnic or cultural boundaries. But for ricotta, I add a little nutmeg.

First salt the cheese. Add two teaspoons to start, stir, taste, then repeat Proceed carefully until pleased with the result. If you really over salted, you could rinse the curds in some of the reserved whey, press again in the sieve, and re add the cream, but why go there?

When you have salted to taste, grate 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg into the mixture for a start, and stir and taste. When seasoning most things, I think the rule should be that it's there, and you'd notice it if it was missing, but you don't really want it jumping out at you. About the only exception to this that I can think of is hush puppies. With hush puppies fresh from the fryer, I want the flavor of pepper to reach out and scratch me, but that's a personal preference.

When you have seasoned your ricotta to taste, it is ready for any recipe that requires it. On a personal note, I just finished watching the entire series of The Sopranos, and keep catching myself pronouncing ricotta, rigott. But however you say it, you have just produced a product for your eating pleasure far superior to what you can find at the supermarket, and saved yourself a few dollars as well.

Best wishes, Scratch

P.S. A mea culpa for any food history monitors out there. Ricotta does, in fact, mean literally "recooked." Traditionally, it is produced from the small, high fat, percentage of curd remaining in the whey left over from the production of mozzarella. I have read that because this requires a second acid separation in this already curd depleted whey, that approximately six tablespoons of ricotta cheese are obtained from one gallon of whole milk. Some commercial producers may still make ricotta this way, and although we have, in my family, begun to experiment with the production of mozzarella using vegetable rennet, we will probably never be making enough mozzarella to justify the production of enough ricotta, of the technically accurate variety, for even a single plate of lasagna. So for now, this is our "once cooked" ricotta, and I hope you enjoy it