Making ricotta cheese at home for the first time!

Ever wanted to make your own cheese?

Microwave Ricotta 4 c whole milk ¾ c plain yogurt 1½ tsp lemon juice ½ tsp salt Line a colander with a clean, thin, undyed cloth. Set it over a large bowl. Mix the ingredients in a different, microwave-safe large bowl. Make sure the milk has plenty of room to boil up in the bowl. Milk is prone to boiling over, and you want to make sure all the boiling foam has plenty of space to be contained rather than spilling all over the microwave. Cook for 60-90 seconds at a time, stirring well after each cooking interval, until the mixture curdles. Watch carefully to make sure it doesn't boil over. Curds will form on the edge of the bowl first, but keep microwaving and stirring the milk until all of it is curdled. Pour into the cloth-lined colander and let drain 5-15 minutes, depending on how dry you want it. This may be cheesemaking heresy (as if doing this by microwave isn't already sacrilege), but if you drain the ricotta too long and it becomes too dry, you can just stir some of the runoff back into it. Note: Instead of ¾ cup yogurt, the original recipe uses ¼ cup yogurt and ½ cup cream. adapted from Melissa Clark for The New York Times

This foray into cheesemaking started with a batch of spinach manicotti I made. Everyone like them, but started "subtly" hinting that perhaps spinach wasn't their noodle-stuffing of choice. I got comments like "So, what if you tried making those spinach things but you used meat in the sauce?" or "We should try those spinach noodles again, but don't you think stuffing it into those pasta tubes was kind of annoying?" Eventually they came out with it: spinach manicotti may be nice, but they wanted a lasagna.

Manicotti may not be lasagna, but the near-empty state of the pan speaks for itself.

Lasagna isn't the cheapest thing anyone ever made, but demand persisted. I eventually wrote out the entire ingredient list, with rough guesses about the price of every item, and said that if no one objected to how much all of it costs then I would put it onto the grocery list. (Though in an interesting turn of fate, we would end up using a lot less meat in a massive pan of lasagna than we do on spaghetti night. In these pandemic-altered grocery prices, lasagna may be cheaper than plain noodles and sauce.)

Lasagna in this house comes with one problem: one person in the house is lactose intolerant, and apparently there's a limit to how much cheese you can eat before those dairy pills stop working. And while I'm sure someone makes lactose-free ricotta, they did not have it at any store near me. (Well, maybe the health food store had it, but they're so expensive I didn't bother to look.)

I hazily remembered reading somewhere that making your own ricotta actually isn't that hard, and decided that I wouldn't mind having a go at it for myself if we purchased lactose-free milk for the purpose. I poked around online and found out that you simply curdle the milk with a bit of lemon juice and then strain it. 

I should note that a lot websites I looked at thought I should pay for specialized cheesemaking equipment, which wasn't going to happen. It was a big day at A Book of Cookrye when we got a kitchen scale. I couldn't handle the excitement of a cheese hoop.

To my surprise, I found a simple recipe that required no weird specialized tools in a New York Times article. I have skimmed through a copy of The New York Times Cookbook, whose writers seem to think that you have a lot of specialty food purveyors and maybe a few custom metalworkers in your Rolodex. Therefore, I was surprised to find that the newspaper had a cheese recipe that seemed like it's meant for ordinary people to try making. Cheesemaking is a very specialized activity, so I was surprised that the Times didn't try to tell me I would need to purchase an commercial dairy farm's worth of cheesemaking equipment before daring to attempt ricotta.

It seems pretty simple: Mix everything, heat it up, pour it in a strainer, and let it drip for a few minutes. After reading the recipe, we realized that this is perfect for the microwave. When you heat milk over the stove, it really wants to stick to the pot and scorch. So you have to turn the burner down to a very low temperature and constantly scrape the bottom of the pot with a rubber spatula while the milk ever-so-slowly heats up. But in the microwave, milk doesn't scorch unless you cook it far too long. You only need to worry about it boiling over, which can be prevented by using a very big bowl.

I think the lemon juice in the recipe makes the milk curdle, and the yogurt replaces the cheese-forming bacteria in the milk that got pasteurized away. If I am right, adding yogurt to the milk introduces a happy group of microscopic cheesemaking helpers without risking diphtheria, brucellosis, and whatever else gets into raw milk. 

I saw a few people online who swore that you must use raw milk for ricotta, which didn't irk me but pissed me off. While cheese enthusiasts can get deep into passionate debates about the flavor merits of raw milk bacterial cultures vs reintroducing bacteria into pasteurized milk, we at A Book of Cookrye don't want to end up in the hospital because of cheese snobbery. Have you heard about any milk-borne disease outbreaks in the last few decades? Exactly.

I decided to microwave this for about 90 seconds at a time, stirring it around every time the microwave beeped at me. Little curds formed around the edges pretty quickly, but they disappeared as soon as we stirred the milk. I was surprised at how long this milk needed to cook, since I'm used to only scalding maybe a half-cup or so at a time for a bread recipe. But after about ten or twelve minutes of cooking time, our milk had gone from a white liquid to a greenish-yellowish translucent fluid with little white larvae floating in it. When the recipe said to cook the milk until it curdled, I expected something like cottage cheese. I nearly overcooked the milk because I thought my curds were too small and that more time in the food-zapper would fix that.

Yes, we have curds and whey just like Little Miss Muffet.

To be realistic, I don't think microwaving your ricotta cheese instead of cooking it on the stovetop will save you time. But as aforementioned, in the microwave you don't have to worry about the milk scorching on the pot and infusing your cheese with a burnt flavor. So microwaving the cheese is easier than slowly and carefully heating it on the stove, even if it takes just as long.

After heating up the milk, the recipe would have us pouring it into cheesecloth to drain. I wasn't about to go out to the craft store and purchase new fabric just to get cheese all over it. Commercial kitchens (and the sort of people who use cheesecloth in the kitchen) purchase cheesecloth in dispenser-boxes like the ones waxed paper and aluminum foil come in. We at A Book of Cookrye have never before needed cheesecloth at the house. Unless we start making ricotta every other week, going to a restaurant supply store for a box of cheesecloth is an extravagance of funds and kitchen shelf space. We got out a clean rag instead. Those of you following along at home should know that unless you plan to immediately launder your cheese-rag, you should rinse it in the kitchen sink as soon as you're done making cheese.

After we strained the whey out of the cheese, we discovered that we had hardly any cheese left. An entire quart of milk (that's about 1 liter) yielded this puny little scoop of cheese.

Apparently this is a mild rite of passage for cheesemakers: finding out that you barely get any cheese out of a large vat of milk. Most of your milk gets drained away. Fortunately, we purchased a half-gallon of lactose-free milk. Therefore, we were able to make two batches of ricotta which (barely) produced a pint of cheese. As you can see by my storage container of choice, I thought we would get a lot more cheese out of a big carton of milk.

I didn't mind how little cheese we got out of a half-gallon of milk. (For our metric friends, that's a scant half-liter of cheese out of 189 centiliters of milk.) However, I was annoyed at myself because I was unprepared for all the whey. I thought we might get a cupful of whey or so out of this cheesemaking adventure, and thus planned to just pour it down the sink. I was not psychologically prepared to waste 3 quarts (that's 3ish liters) of perfectly good whey. I don't know what whey is good for, but I damn well would have found out had I known how much of it I was about to waste.

All of this went down the drain, and one day I may stop feeling guilty about it.

As for the ricotta itself, it tasted just like the ricotta you purchase at the store. So based on my single cheese experience, I don't think ricotta is better if you make it yourself. 

However, I didn't get into cheesemaking because I was fed up with the subpar quality of supermarket ricotta. We made ricotta for ourselves so that even the lactose intolerant in the house can eat lasagna without internal peril.

It looks like I'm spackling the noodles, doesn't it? In case you're wondering, I got my lasagna recipe from my aunt, who told me she just uses the directions on the noodle box.

So while homemade ricotta isn't magically better than the stuff you can just purchase on the cheese aisle, it's a nice introduction to cheesemaking. You don't need to buy any special kitchen tools, and the cheese is ready to eat in less than an hour after you started making it. But like shaking a jar of cream until it forms butter or making pita bread, making your own ricotta is more about the joy of edible kitchen crafts than the food you get afterward. 

Or you might make your own ricotta if you're making lasagna for your lactose-intolerant friends and can't get any de-lactosed ricotta cheese to put in it. Granted, we generously topped the lasagna with cheese we had not made ourselves, but anyone who can eat a slice or two of pizza could safely dig in. And did they ever! This unfortunately means that lasagna is now feasible for everyone in the house, but if they're willing to spring for a half-gallon of milk, I'm willing to turn it to cheese.