Ricotta Cheese

I'm a little slow on the cheesemaking. It's kind of ridiculous. I have everything I need to do most of the recipes in the book Home Dairy, but something keeps me from trying it. I think it's because this is a whole new realm for me. And well, to be perfectly honest, I thought only hippies made their own cheese. (Sorry) Whatever. Homemade dairy is good, and I hope I have a dairy cow of my own someday.

Tonight I made ricotta for the first time ever. I was doubtful. I was actually pretty sure it wasn't going to work because my attempts at mozzarella were just plain embarrassing. But my ricotta worked and it tasted so unbelievably amazing that I'm not sure if I will stomach commercial ricotta again.

I followed the exact recipe in Ashley English's book Home Dairy. I didn't get the yield of 1 pound that the book boasts, but we got a decent amount.

Here's what I used:
8 Cups Whole Milk
1 Cup Heavy Cream
1/2 Cup Lemon Juice
1/4 teaspoon of calcium chloride, mixed with 1/4 cup cold sterilized water. *
1/2 teaspoon of kosher salt
dairy thermometer
large saucepan
colander
cheese cloth

*you can get calcium chloride online or at cheesemaking/wine & beer brewing shops. If you are local I recommend Grape & Granary.*

Here's what I did:
Mix milk, cream & lemon juice in a large saucepan with a metal spoon. Warm directly over medium-high heat until you reach 170 degrees. I only stirred the mixture once to keep it from sticking.
Then I added my calcium chloride/cold water mixture and gave it a little stir. I kept the pan over heat during this step and then just kept my eye on the thermometer until it reached 195 degrees. I had to adjust my heat a few times to keep it from boiling.

Once it hit 195 degrees I removed my pan from the heat and it continued to rise to 200 degrees. Then I just let the pan sit there and rest while I made dinner.

After about 20 minutes I spooned the curds into a colander that I lined with a double-layer of cheese cloth and I let the mixture sit for another 15 - 20 minutes or so.

That's it.

I used a dollop on dinner and it went from meh... to ohmygoodness!

Dinner was Fettucini with pan-fried Tilapia and some veggies (2 carrots, 6 mushrooms, 1 Cup Kale, 2 Cup Spinach, 2 Cloves Garlic sauteed).

Enjoy!

Pasta & Cheese

We eat pasta and cheese a lot. Probably more than we should, but it's easy. The kids eat it up with butter, the grown ups get a little bit of olive oil, some garlic and tomatoes. We throw a salad on the side, and dinner is ready.

In an effort to simplify, we have complicated things temporarily. We made our own mozzarella and our own pasta and learned a lot during the experiments.  We traded the crying baby back and forth, managed the behavior of two very unruly little girls all while mixing, boiling, hovering over thermometers...but we did it.

For the mozzarella I used the recipe in the book Home Dairy. I am a little, um...unruly in the kitchen and I tend to ignore most directions and just kind of wing it and see what happens. This isn't a great idea when making cheese, apparently.

-My first attempt: I tried organic milk which, it turns out, is a bad idea because it's ultra-pasteurized. No curds, no cheese.
-My second attempt: I used the microwave to heat up the curds. I had no idea our microwave even had a high setting, so this took me forever because my curds didn't reach that shiny, melty texture until I doubled the time.  It worked, but the flavor suffered.
-My third attempt: I used the heated whey method and a mesh strainer instead of a slotted spoon, and my yield was about half of what it should have been. My curds were all mashed together because of the strainer and super liquidy when I ladled in the heated whey.

So don't be a fool. Follow the directions...unlike me.

I guess making pasta is a pretty common thing, but we had never ever attempted it.There was a thing or two for us to learn along the way.

-Our first attempt was to roll out the dough and cut it with a knife. We ended up with big, fat noodles that the kids called 'snakes'. Whatever, it was good and we ate it.
 
-Our second attempt involved buying a magazine for a coupon, then going next door to buy a pasta maker with the coupon, followed by about an hour of cleaning the machine out. We learned that your dough cannot be sticky at all to use the pasta maker. Our original recipe was very sticky, and we ended up adding about twice as much flour, which yielded way too much pasta. But it worked and it was so great. I mean, greater than any pasta I've ever had ever.

Fresh pasta with homemade mozzarella, tossed with homemade butter, olive oil, a clove of crushed garlic, sliced tomato, dried basil, salt and pepper. And you know we ate more of those brownies immediately after scraping the bottom of this bowl, right? Yeah, we totally did.