Buckle up, friends! This is a do-it-yourselfer the likes of which we haven't seen around these parts since that whole duck prosciutto episode.
Since two of my favorite things in the world are a) making things from scratch that are readily available for sale elsewhere and b) cheese, you may be surprised it has taken me this long to make cheese in my own kitchen. But honestly, for most cheeses, it's kind of a crazy undertaking. You have to buy rennet or curds, there's often aging involved, and it certainly isn't a cost savings. But when I went to the Astor Center class on pizza-making a few months back, I happened to get a little hands-on cheesemaking experience as well.
We made mozzarella and ricotta in class. For the mozz, you buy the curds from Murray's, but all you need to make ricotta is milk and acid (like lemon juice, or vinegar). And then imagine my joy when I found this on Serious Eats: directions for doing it in the microwave. Yes, part of the joy of doing it yourself is tackling the process, but if the shortcut produces results that are just as good, I'm all for it.
So. Whole milk. Salt. Into the Pyrex. I made one batch with vinegar, but it's slightly more photogenic to make it with lemon. (More on the lemon thing in a sec.) Like so:
Pop the liquid into the microwave and rig up a strainer with a few extra layers of paper towels:
As you heat it, the acid pulls the milk solids into curds -- tiny, tiny ones -- and things start to separate. (Yours won't have the black specks; I used truffle salt just for fun, but the flavor didn't really come through, so salt-salt is a better call.)
Short blasts of heat to bring the mixture up to the right temp:
And then you stir to bring the curds out of the whey, and you spoon those curds into the paper-towel-lined strainer:
(see, the curds are not big at all, so don't expect giant clumps from your curdling)
I spooned most of the curds onto the paper towel since the Serious Eats directions suggested that pouring the whole thing through might pack the curds too tight, but in the end after all the spooning there were still a lot of curds in the Pyrex, so I did end up pouring all the liquid through the strainer. I tried to pour it off to the side of the pile of curds so it didn't squish them too much, if that makes sense.
I also didn't leave it in the strainer for very long. I wanted a softer ricotta. Half of it ended up in mushroom lasagna rolls (there'll be a whole series of posts on that one, believe me) and the other half in a very simple and delicious appetizer I highly recommend: walnut toasts brushed with truffle oil and then dolloped with the ricotta. Simple, good with wine, and not something people see every day.
So, about the lemon vs. vinegar. I used vinegar in my first batch, and it worked like a charm, curdling the milk right away as the temperature came up to 170. The second batch, I made with lemon juice, and it didn't curdle right away -- but I had also played with the amounts, replacing some of the milk with cream, since I was trying to use up a large container of cream that I'd bought for some other purpose. Maybe the higher amount of fat in the cream took longer to curdle. Maybe the lemon juice wasn't acid enough. In any case, I had to add a boost of vinegar and cook the milk longer to get to the curdling point. If things aren't coming together, try more heat and more acid, but not too much of either. Gradual tweaking is the key.
Final note: leftover whey. When you make ricotta this way you'll have more than a cup of whey left, and it feels like a waste to throw it out. Yet it's kind of a thin white liquid that smells like vinegar, so it doesn't exactly scream "Drink me for fun!" I froze the leftovers until I could think of something to do with them, and the answer came just a few days later -- I used it as the cooking liquid for polenta.
So would I make ricotta again? Absolutely, if I only wanted a small amount, for something like the walnut toasts where the ricotta is the star. But for a lasagna or something else where lots of cheese is required, a purchase is probably the way to go. (It takes four cups of milk to make a scant cup of cheese, so you can see where the math breaks down.)
But part of the fun of making ricotta is just to say that you did. So I can happily point to this cheese, and say with pride: I made this.
Comments