If you have never had fresh ricotta be warned, once you do,
it will be hard to buy another plastic tub of it again. The texture is creamy,
with a sweet mild flavor. It takes well to nearly any flavor ingredient you add
and it makes nice with recipes from savory to sweet!
The texture will probably be the first thing you notice.
Without the stabilizers that are added to other mass batch ricotta – there is
no grainy gelatin texture. You can control how moist you want the ricotta by
how long you leave it in the sieve.
The method is simple; heated milk and cream and an acid to
cause the curd and whey to separate. I have tried others recipes that use lemon
juice as the acid to varying degrees of success…actually they were not
successful. The acid of the lemons were not enough to cause the reaction
necessary. The yield of curd was less and much finer. There was a pleasant and
mild lemon flavor – but overall not what I wanted for a full recipe of thick
and creamy ricotta. Incidentally – the lemon recipes that I tried ended up in
lemon ricotta pancakes!
