Making ricotta cheese at home is easy. As in any dolt with half a brain can do it. It’s so easy that I can explain in one sentence: bring 1 gallon of milk to a simmer with 1 tsp salt, add 3 TBS lemon juice and stir for one or two minutes until curds form, then skim off curds and drain in a cheesecloth lined colander. Pay attention to those instructions, in particular the equipment needed, because they are important. I found out the hard way that while the process is easy, the execution is anything but when you don’t have the right stuff on hand.
First let’s start with a mistake of my habit of blind reaching for pans. I decided to make fresh ricotta for the baked ziti I prepared for us to have on hand when we didn’t feel like cooking this week. But I made the egregious error of cooking my red sauce in the larger of my two sauce pans, so when it came time to do the ricotta I had barely enough room.
As you can see from the picture the milk came almost up to the lip. Now I could have decreased the amount of milk, but you get about 1 to 1 ½ cups of cheese for every gallon of milk used. And I needed at least a cup of cheese. So I tested fate. It turned out OK, with a minimum amount of sloshing. It did pose a problem keeping the milk from scalding as I couldn’t really stir the milk all that much. Considering all of this in the end that wasn’t much of an issue.
The serious problems started during the actual cheese retrieval process. I don’t have a spider or skimmer (for shame, I know), so I turned to my trusty bin of ladles and stirring utensils. The first thing I tried is a tiny fine mesh strainer I use for even sprinkling of confectionary sugar or removing seeds from a raspberry sauce. All that did was scoop up milk and curd, with nothing draining away. So I turned to the old metal slotted spoon, which worked better but I lost a lot of the curd.
Things only got worse from there as I haven’t had cheesecloth in the house for a few years now, and I forgot to look for some when out. Actually I haven’t seen cheesecloth at the store in a long while, but when I do I’ll be sure to grab it just in case I decide to do more experiments. You never know when you need to wring something out. In the past I’ve turned to paper towels (untreated of course) for dairy draining purposes such as making a yogurt sauce. I figured this would be acceptable as a substitute.
Look at the picture and you’ll see I was wrong. The curds are supposed to drain for just a minute or two before being refrigerated. What you’re looking at is the slop that was in the colander for about 5 minutes. Eventually I had to shake the mixture around to try and get as much of the milk out as possible.
It all turned out splendid in the end, if a bit soupy. I alleviated that a bit by using the aforementioned fine mesh scoop to get mostly cheese when I added it to the ziti. And besides I just look at this as my way of preparing the most light and juicy ricotta anyone’s ever had.
I also apologize for the pictures. When trying to get a few shots using my wife’s Canon XSi the thing kept whirring at me without taking a photo. I assume it couldn’t focus on anything in that wasteland of white. I’m certain I heard the camera utter “You’re an idiot” at least once during the process. To make up for my poor photographic skills I’ve included a nice picture my wife took of her watch. Enjoy that.
