Ricotta Cheese

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Ricotta cheese is one of the easiest cheeses to make; we’ve only had it fail once — for this post of all things. But we persevered and made our own 100% scratched ricotta that will go into our mushroom ravioli. Even though ours failed the first time, we’ll provide that as our recipe and we’ll tell you what we did for the second.

Ricotta Cheese

Author: Shawn

Ingredients

  • 1/2 gallon milk
  • 1/2 tsp non-iodized salt
  • Juice of 1 lemon or 1/2 tsp citric acid

Instructions

  • Pour milk in a 3 quart sauce pan. Add salt and lemon juice (or citric acid).
  • Heat the milk to 195°F. It will seem to curdle, but that is just the cheese separating from the whey.
  • Line a colander with butter muslin and pour the curds and whey through.
  • Tie the butter muslin shut and suspend it to drain. Let it drain for 30 minutes.

Ingredient discussion:

Use the freshest milk you can find and be careful to avoid the Ultra Pasteurized milk; they won’t make cheese. You can use whole, 2%, 1%, or even skim. It’ll all work. The first batch we tried to make with the lemon juice. It looked good for a while and then something happened and the curds disappeared, we don’t know what since we’ve made ricotta with fresh lemon juice before and it was fine. If you want to go the citric acid route, you can easily find it on-line — it’s generally included with those cheesemaking starter kits (we have one, it’s a lot of fun).

Procedure in detail:

milk, salt, lemon
Basic ingredients for making cheese — an acid (lemon juice), salt, and milk.

Pour milk in a 3 quart sauce pan.

Add salt and lemon juice (or citric acid).

curds and whey
The curds will separate from the whey and it’ll look like you might have a mess, don’t despair!

Heat. While heating stir the milk so it won’t scorch. Heat the milk to 195°F. It will seem to curdle, but that is just the cheese separating from the whey.

Let stand 5 minutes.

curds in a colander
Draining the whey from the curds.

Drain. Line a colander with butter muslin — not cheese cloth, the holes are too large — and pour the curds and whey through.

cheese hanging to drain
Be creative in devising a way to hang your cheese. It’ll only be for 30 minutes.

Drain more. Tie the butter muslin shut and suspend it to drain. Let it drain for 30 minutes.

ricotta cheese.
Look at that! Cheese! Who knew it would be so easy?

Done. You’ve made cheese. How easy is that?

Now, we’ll be honest, we don’t always go to the trouble of making our own ricotta cheese, but we do make it for that special dinner. It’s really easy and it (almost) always turns out. Four stars.

Worth the trouble?

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