Ricotta Cheese

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I’m Rebecca Nolan, cheesemaker and teacher at Ploughshare. I’ve been making cheese now for about 12 years. Yesterday I calculated that I’ve probably, in the past five years, turned between 75,000 and 100,000 gallons worth of milk into cheese.

In this video, we’ll be making milk ricotta. It’s a quick, easy way to get a ricotta. It’s similar to cottage cheese, but cottage cheese takes about six or eight hours to make, whereas this ricotta only takes about half an hour and then it’s ready to use right away in your lasagna, or any other dish you’d like to use it in. Or you can freeze it for later use.

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You start with a gallon of milk. This is a nice ricotta to make when you need something quick. It usually doesn’t take that long to make. You start with your gallon of milk, and you add in a teaspoon of citric acid, and a teaspoon of salt. Now when you’re making milk ricotta, you want to make sure that the pot that you’re using is a thick-bottom type. You can see how this one has a thicker bottom. Because if you use a pot that has a bottom that’s too thin, because I’ll be heating this up to between 180 and 190, it will scorch on the bottom and burn. So you want to make sure you use a little bit heavier duty pot.

It’s at 60 degrees now, so it’s going to take it a while to get to 180 to 190. Once it starts reaching about 170, you’ll be able to start seeing the curds form. You can kind of feel a grating kind of feeling on the bottom, and that’s the salt and citric acid. They’re not all the way dissolved yet, so you want to keep stirring until you get those all the way dissolved.

Then you just want to keep an eye on it. You don’t have to stir it the whole time, but you do want to stir it every few minutes, just to make sure it’s not sticking to the bottom. It’ll take about 10 to 15 minutes for it to get to 180 to 190, so during that time you want to stir it frequently. At first, before it’s like 100 or 110, you don’t have to stir it constantly. Once you get to about between, I would say, 120, 140, you want to make sure that you’re keeping it going. You can see it’s starting to already form of few little curds here on top, but the rest of them won’t really form until it starts getting closer to about 170.

So once it starts getting around 170, you want to keep it stirring all the time, because it’ll start to stick on the bottom, and as you stir, you’ll start feeling the milk get thicker and thicker. You can see it’s starting to foam up a little bit, and usually it’ll start breaking into the curds right around 180. You want to make sure that while you’re doing it at this point, you keep it stirring pretty good. About 175 now.

The milk’s kind of starting to get a little bit of a grainy look, so your curds are starting to form in there. Just keep it stirring. Sometimes it doesn’t actually form the curds until around between 180 and 190, but you want to just keep it on. It’s at 180 now. I’m going to keep it moving, but I’m going to slow down just a little bit, so that once the curds start to form, it doesn’t break them up too much. The biggest thing is to keep it out, keep it moving around and out of that hot spot in the center.

You can see the fine curds starting to form right in there. You can see as I stir, there’s the curds. So it’s almost right exactly between 180 and 190, and you’re starting to get the curds. OK, see that? Now it’s all turning into curds.

And once you have the curds, you can go ahead and shut it off, and in just a minute, it’ll all clump together. You can see the yellow whey, and then down underneath there you’ve got your white curds. And usually I let it sit for just a minute, because then it will all clump together where you can drain it through a colander. Once you can pull up a spoonful of the curds and they stick together like that, you can go ahead and drain it, and they’ll hold together.

So what you want to do is you want to have a bowl with a colander set inside of it. You want to make sure the holes on your colander aren’t too large, or else your ricotta will go through it.

You want to pour it in slow, so that when the ricotta actually falls into the colander, it doesn’t shatter it, because the curds are still pretty fine. If you pour it nice and slow, they are clumping together at the bottom of the pot, so when you pour it in you’re going to get more of a mass than actual individual curds. Slowly pour that in. You can just scrape the part that sticks.

When you make milk ricotta, it doesn’t really need to drain very long at all. I usually just take it and shake it to get any of the excess whey out. Put it into a bowl. And you’ll get about a cup and a half to two cups of ricotta. And you can go ahead and eat it now, or you can freeze it if you want to use it later.

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