Ricotta Cheese

A few weeks ago I tried to make ricotta cheese... you may have read that it was a dismal failure... but I learned from it.  I kind of like having a few failures in the kitchen because whenever I fail, I learn a little bit about what NOT to do!

So for ricotta...  what I love about it is that it can be made from leftover whey after making other things.  This week I made cottage cheese from a gallon of milk and that gave me a little less than a gallon of beautiful yellow whey.  Then I made some cheddar cheese curds from a little over a gallon of milk and ended up with another gallon of whey.

What is a girl to do with 2 gallons of whey?  Go figure... I made ricotta cheese.  See I have been hungry for homemade lasagna for a few weeks and I just stay hungry for it.  When I say homemade, I mean make every part of it myself except for butchering the cow (yuck - count me out for the animal slaughter part of farming).  So I needed to make the red sauce (have canned tomatoes from the garden), make the ricotta, make the mozzarella, make the noodles (just found a homemade noodle recipe) and put it all together from whole and fresh ingredients.  mmmm......  some people call this too much work... I call it heavenly eating and well worth it!

The first step in making ricotta is to leave the whey out on the counter for 12 - 24 hours.  That idea repulsed me a bit but I did it anyway.  Haven't we all been trained not to eat things left at room temp for a long time?  Then to put the whey (2 gallons of it) into a big pot with a thick bottom and heat it to 203 degrees.  Once it reached 203 degrees I took it off the heat and left it covered until it cooled again to room temp.  This took a few hours for 2 gallons of whey.
But here is what it looked like when cooled:

BINGO!  I was so excited to see that white curdy stuff in my pan!  I made the usual exclamation to Mike when I have success with something "Mike, I am actually making ricotta cheese"...  He hears a lot of those kind of exclamations during my cooking expeditions, as well as the ones where I am mumbling or cursing quietly because something has gone awry.  You see, Mike works from home as an independent contractor and I stay home doing what I do, so we have a lot of together time.  This is really helpful some days and I thank the Good Lord that he is a supportive man and I get to have him around.

As I watched the curds form in the whey, I realized some of what I did wrong the last time I tried to make ricotta.  I tried to strain that mess through a cheesecloth and colander but the small bits of ricotta are really SO FINE that I basically drained it all away.

This time I was prepared with a tea towel and colander.  The tea towel provides a tight weave.  Several weeks ago I bought a chunk of muslin, washed it, cut it into several towel sized pieces and serged the sides so that I could use them for things like this.  It provides the perfect weave for fine filtration!

It took quite a while to drain the whey from the ricotta through this tea towel.  The fine ricotta kind of gummed up the drainage but I persisted and drained and squeezed all the whey out until I found this in my cloth:

HOMEMADE RICOTTA CHEESE!  Yippppeeeeee.. first successful step towards the lasagna!

But what was I to do with the leftover 1 1/2 gallons of whey?  Why, I fed the compost bin, of course!  Might as well give all that nutrition to the vegetables and fruits we are going to grow next year!