Make Your Own Cheese
I've made my own cheese before. I've also been seeing a lot of homemade cheese recipes on pinterest that were peaking my interest so I got my ingredients and had at it. In all of about 15 minutes, I had my very own homemade fresh Ricotta cheese.
I looked a various recipe, and ended up using a recipe from FramedCooks as my guideline for my first try. You need not be intimidated. This is very easy.
What you need.
Three ingredients and cheese cloth. Yes. Cheese cloth. I know, I know....you're overwhelmed already. Just take it easy. You can get cheese cloth in just about any grocery store.
Heavy cream. Whole Milk. Buttermilk.
That's it, assuming you have some coarse sea salt in the pantry.
Let's get to it.
Fresh Homemade Ricotta
2 cups of whole milk
1 cup of buttermilk
1/3 cup heavy cream
pinch of sea salt
Put ingredients in heavy saucepan on medium high and bring to slow boil. Cook for 10 to 15 minutes. Stir a couple of times if you like, but it's really not necessary. You will see the curds (the solids) and the whey (the liquid) separate. Line colander with cheesecloth. You can either use a slotted spoon to scoop out the solids and put them into colander in the sink, or you can just pour the entire pot into colander and the whey will strain through. You can let it rest just like that in the cheese cloth lined colander or you can hang from the faucet. I hung mine for about 5 minutes. I'd only caution you not to scald the bottom of the pan by having the heat too high.
That's it. No kidding.
It's delicious. We had some on crusty bread just to make sure it was ok.
It was.
And it was so easy, I made another batch.
I used some in the zuchini lasagna I made last night and it took up a notch.
Divine.
There's no going back to store-bought ricotta now.
How was your weekend? Ours went by too fast. Still working on the shower reconstruction. None of these projects go as easily as you'd like. That's a given. If you've never worked on a construction project in your home, I'm here to make sure you know that. Throw in the fact that the front of our house sits on a concrete slab and that can make things a little more complicated that we'd like. One step at a time, right? We wanted to get a campfire going out back on Saturday, but the wind just wouldn't give up. So we built a fire inside instead.
What'd you do?
Hey, before I forget. Happy Earth Day.
Get out and enjoy some nature!
Ciao for now,
