How to make Ricotta cheese at home ?

Honestly, we don’t often think about making ricotta at home because it’s so easy to find pre-packaged ricotta at the supermarket or fresh ricotta from the shepherd in small grocery stores.

But sometimes we crave ricotta at the last minute, have too much leftover milk, or haven’t found lactose-free or veg ricotta.

Do you want to learn how to make ricotta? You will get a product very similar to the ricotta you usually eat: to be precise we can talk about curd, which we will get from whole milk while the real ricotta is supplied from raw whey.

Maybe you never thought about it, but ricotta is called this because it is re-cooked: that is, the whey is cooked twice to obtain this fresh dairy product

To prepare 250g =1 cup of homemade ricotta you need

Ingredients

• 1 liter= 4.2 cups approx. of good quality whole milk (the quality of the dairy products will depend on the quality of the milk) – you can use also lactose free milk or soya milk(with a min.1.9% fats)

• filtered juice of half a lemon

• two pinches of salt

Tools

• a metal or plastic sieve

• a cheese-sieve

• a strainer

• a pot for 1 liter=4.2cups of milk

• 1 cooking thermometer (if available)

Time :20 minutes preparation + 3/4 hours in the refrigerator

Procedure

1.Pour the milk into a pan, put it on the heat (medium)and bring it to a temperature of 50C=122 F degrees. If you do not use the thermometer, till you see bubbles forming on the side of the pan:

2.Add lemon and salt and mix with a wooden spoon.

3.cook for about ten minutes. (low heat)

4.Break the curd (cagliata in italian)that has formed and gently skim curds from whey in a strainer, collecting the whey that will drip.

5.Transfer them to a cheese sieve when they have lost the liquid and leave to rest in the fridge for 3-4 hours. –

Tips:

*you can substitute the lemon juice with a tbsp. white vinegar

*If you want to prepare a “real” ricotta, take the whey you collected, add 150ml of whole milk and repeat the procedure described above, until the flakes are transferred to the cheese -sieve and left to rest in the fridge. –

* If you like, you can enrich the ricotta inside the cheese-sieve with arugula, paprika, basil or grated lemon zest.-