Ricotta --- the bonus cheese
I'll
admit that when my parents made lasagna with ricotta when I was a kid, I
tried to pick around the grainy cheese. But I now that I'm
experimenting with cheesemaking, I've learned the purpose of ricotta ---
turning all that cultured whey into something useful. And, sure enough,
two quarts of milk turned into 9.5 ounces of neufchatel,
while leaving enough proteins in the whey to create another 2.9 ounces
of ricotta. Thus, I've decided this subtly acidic cheese is hereafter to
be referred to as "bonus cheese."
(Okay, not really. You can keep calling it ricotta. But doesn't "bonus cheese" sound good?)
Ricotta is almost too
simple to post about. You take your leftover whey and allow the liquid
to sit, covered, at room temperature for 12 to 24 hours. Next, boil to
separate the curds from the whey, then strain out the chemically altered
(greenish) whey off your new cheese.
The boiling step is
supposed to be a near-boil, using a double boiler to heat the cultured
whey to 203 degrees Fahrenheit. However, after an hour in our double
boiler, the whey was beginning to separate out little curds...but still
hadn't surpassed 180 degrees. Only after decanting the whey into a pot
to cook it the rest of the way directly on the stove, at which point it
boiled at around 198 degrees Fahrenheit, did I realize that I really
should have factored in changing boiling temperatures due to elevation.
(Or, perhaps, the fact that my candy thermomter might not be accurate?)
So, to cut a long story short --- you can make ricotta just fine by
simply bringing the whey to a boil then removing it from the heat.
Anyway, after you boil
your whey, you let it cool for a couple of hours, then pour the curds
and whey into a clean cloth above a strainer. I used our new straining funnel for this step.
You'll also notice that I
moved to a white cloth instead of the colored one I'd used for my
previous cheeses. I learned the hard way that cheese picks up a little
bit of lint from the cloth, which is unsightly if the fabric is colored.
But if the cloth is white, no one ever knows....
I actually loved the
flavor of this ricotta plain, but I'm thinking of trying it in a
chocolate cheesecake with some of the neufchatel. Because everything tastes better with a little chocolate....
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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While I usually love getting bonus anything, I am allergic to ricotta cheese. Every time I eat it I throw up for 24 hours. I always feel like I've missed out on "real" Italian, and my husbands family never remembers, so when they have Lasagna, I get to bring Taco Bell.
Most manufacturers actually add other stuff to get the whey to curd up, and I've always wondered if that's what I'm allergic to, instead of the cheese. I wonder if I would be allergic to homemade ricotta? I would be afraid to find out!