We play with our food: Ricotta

Monday, August 31, 2009

Ricotta

By all reports, homemade ricotta tastes way better than the store-bought stuff that comes in those plastic yogurt containers. It didn't sound too hard to make, and I wanted to make a lasagne, so I needed ricotta, so I figured I'd give it a try. I used this recipe, but I used 1% milk and 1% yogurt, because if I'm going to be left with half a gallon of mile and 3 cups of yogurt, well gosh darn I want to have something that I like to drink. I should have used the cream, though, but I forgot to get it when I was at the store.

Anyway, low-fatness aside, the cheese-making worked. This is a new milestone, I've made my own cheese! Unfortunately, it tasted exactly the same as the stuff that comes in plastic tubs from the grocery store, and it was a lot more work. Probably because I wasn't using whole milk, I only ended up with about a cup's worth of cheese, so that was a lot of work for not much to show... Oh well.

So, use David Lebovitz's recipe for making this stuff, as using low fat milk and low fat yogurt results in a low fat tasting cheese. Which was perfectly fine in the lasagne, and frankly, I don't know what else you do with ricotta cheese, so no big deal.

First you put everything in a big pot. The vinegar sort of curdles the milk, but not really until it boils.

Here it is starting to boil. I have to admit, I let it boil for 4 minutes rather than 2... seemed ok. But what would I know...

Then you pour it into your cloth over the strainer. I should mention that I don't have any cheesecloth, but my dish towel worked just fine.

I actually had to transfer it to a second bowl and pour out the first bowlful of whey (I assume thats whats left over when you're just keeping the curds?), because 8 cups of milk is a lot of liquid. Anyway, this is what it looked like after 5 minutes or so of draining.