How to Make Homemade Ricotta Cheese - The Easy Way!

today I want to share with you how to make homemade ricotta cheese the easy way hi sweet friends I'm Mary and welcome to Mary's nest where I teach traditional cooking skills for making nutrient-dense foods like bone broth ferments sourdough and more so if you enjoy learning about those things consider subscribing to my channel and don't forget to click on the little notification bell below that'll let you know every time I upload a new video now this is the quick version of ricotta cheese and all you're going to need is a gallon of milk two cups of heavy cream a teaspoon of salt and a quarter cup of white vinegar now instead of white vinegar if you'd prefer to use lemon juice you can certainly do that just know that your ricotta will have a slightly lemony taste to it as opposed to and using the vinegar it really leaves a very neutral taste and the salt is also used for taste so if you're on a salt restricted diet and you want to leave the salt out you can now I'm just using a teaspoon of salt if you want you can certainly use more salt but I recommend starting with a teaspoon for a gallon of milk and then once you've made this once and you've tasted it you can determine in for future batches if you want to add more or less salt but I find about a teaspoon of salt is perfect now I just want to say a word about ricotta cheese and I discuss this with you in the video where I showed you how to make cottage cheese which I'll put in the I cards I'll link to in the I cards and in the description below but these are quick versions what I showed you was a quick cottage cheese that was made without rennet and this is a quick ricotta it's very similar to real ricotta but you don't have to go through the stage of where you're making mozzarella cheese first real ricotta is made from the liquid or the way that's left over after you've made mozzarella cheese but if you don't want to get involved in the process of making mozzarella cheese so that you have that way that's left over this is a quick way to make homemade ricotta cheese that will be very similar in taste and texture to what you would get if you were using the way from having made mozzarella cheese and what's nice about making these homemade cheeses that are made on the stovetop is that you don't need rennet and they can be made very quickly and cottage cheese and ricotta cheese these quick versions are sort of on a continuum so to speak of stovetop cheese making you may have also heard of pot cheese and farmer's cheese pot cheese just getting its name from the fact that it's made in a pot on the stove and they're all very similar in taste and texture the only difference is how high you heat the milk or for how long what type of acid you add do you add salt so on and so forth and that will affect the type of curd that you get and your end product so doing it one way will lend itself looking more like a cottage cheese and on the other far end of this continuum doing it a slightly different way will give you a texture that looks more like a ricotta cheese so hopefully that gives you a little explanation of these stovetop cheeses and where they are sort of on this continuum of homemade cheeses now to make ricotta cheese this quick version you can use raw milk or you can use pasteurized milk whatever you can find and I know most of you have told me you don't always have access to raw milk or you'd rather not buy raw milk so I'm using just a pasteurized organic milk today to make this all you're gonna need is a large heavy-bottomed saucepan or our large pot like this or stockpot something along those lines that can hold your gallon of milk and you want it to be a heavy weight this is an enameled cast iron a heavy bottomed stainless steel pan will work very well and the reason is you know milk can tend to burn and with a heavy bottomed pan and just keeping it on a medium heat you'll have your best success and you least likelihood of burning your milk so now we'll go ahead and just pour in our milk into the saucepan into this pot and then we're going to turn our heat up to medium and now we'll go ahead and add in our cream and now if you're using it we'll go ahead and add in our salt and then we'll just give this all a nice little stir to incorporate the milk and the cream and the salt now what you want to do is bring this up to a temperature somewhere between 195 degrees and 200 degrees Fahrenheit and if you have a thermometer that you can use to determine that great but if not don't worry on medium heat now granted every stove is slightly different but on medium heat it's going to take a good 30 minutes probably to get this up to being hot enough and what you'll want to do is periodically come by and stir this make sure that nothing's sticking to the bottom and that it's not getting too hot you definitely do not want to boil your milk so as you're heating this if you don't have a thermometer you've got it on your medium heat you're getting close to that 30 minute 35 minute mark if you start to see a little bubbles starting to form on top it's probably hot enough because you do not want this to start boiling but I also want to reassure you about this whole process this is not an exact science if it's a little under the right temperature it's a little over the right temperature as long as it's not been boiled your cheese is going to come out find the only difference that temperature has a significant affect on is the size of the curd so like when we make cottage cheese we really only bring it up to about 120 degrees Fahrenheit and that is very easy to test because if you can put your finger into the milk and a clean finger and it feels hot I say like a warm bath sometimes only because my hands are so heat tolerance from years of cooking but a warm bath they're hot you know you've reached the right temperature this will be hot where you would not want to put your finger into it but as I said you're just gonna you know look and if bubbles are starting to form it looks like it might be getting close to boiling then you want to turn off the heat but don't worry about being exact it's going to come out fine your curds might be a little bigger or a little smaller one way or the other but it's still going to be a very tasty cheese and something that'll be very versatile to use and a lot of recipes to eat straight or to put in a you know like a lasagna or to stuff ravioli you know it's gonna be fine well this has come up to a nice hot temperature it's between about 195 and 200 and I'm gonna overlay a video to show you what you're looking for in the event that you don't have a thermometer to test this but you may get some little bubbles on top you may get a little foam on top and that'll help you know that you're in that right or correct temperature range to move on to the next step and once you get to that right temperature you want to turn your stove off now one thing I want to mention is on using this little burner this took me about 40 minutes on my glass top stove it's an electric stove glass top takes me 30 maybe 35 minutes so as you see there are variations but you just want to look for a little bubbles little foam and you'll know that you're in that right temperature range now when you get to that point you just want to turn off your heat and the one thing I do want to mention as to temperature don't feel the need to rush this don't go over medium heat you may be tempted to go medium high or high but then you risk the chance of scorching your milk if you do decide you want to speed things up a little and you go to medium-high then you're gonna need to babysit this and you're gonna stay have to stay with it and make sure that nothing's sticking on the bottom and then adjust the temperature down lower if you start to feel anything sticking on the bottom but that's your biggest fear you don't want to scorch or burn your milk so give it the time that it needs and it's going to come out perfect now with the heat off and at this point it doesn't matter if it's an electric burner or a gas burner because you do want that residual heat coming up from your burner you want to add in your vinegar and we've just got that quarter cup of vinegar if you're doing lemon juice you'll add in your quarter cup of lemon juice then you just want to give this a little bit of a stir just to incorporate that acid throughout but you want to be very gentle about this because you don't want to create big curds we want to keep this nice and small like traditional ricotta so just give that a little bit of a stir to incorporate all that vinegar and now we're just gonna let this rest for about five minutes now after about five minutes you should start to see all of the cheese beginning to curdle and separating into your curds your cheese and your way and I'm gonna take a little video and overlay it and this is what you're going to want to see you'll see a very watery solution with all of the cheese curdling on top now I like to talk about diagnosing problems here because sometimes with these stovetop cheeses you can run into a little problem in terms of it not curdling if that happens to you if you find you just have a few curds on top maybe a little bit of the milk beginning to curdle on top forming the cheese but you don't see a lot and your watery solution your way still looks quite white then what you'll want to do is add another tablespoon of vinegar or lemon juice whatever acid that you're using and give it a very gentle stir underneath the existing curds and just put usually I like to do it with a fork just put a fork down into your pot and just stir it a little to try to disseminate some of that vinegar throughout the the way and that should help create more curdle if not then you can add another tablespoon but that should probably be enough this is not an exact science generally about a quarter cup of vinegar or lemon juice to a gallon of milk should create enough curdling and the separation of the liquid into the way and nothing's basically that the quarter cup of vinegar should be enough to create the cheese and cause the milk to curdle separating your cheese from your way basically what you're going to be looking for on top are some very small little curds like this and I'll take a close-up picture so that you can see this and now we'll get ready to move into the next step what you're gonna need is some kind of bowl or you can I'm using a glass bowl so you can see exactly what I'm doing but you'll want a large bowl or even a stockpot can work very well and then you're gonna want some type of strainer I think a colander works really well for this if you have just a handheld mesh mesh mesh strainer you can use that as well something like this just a standard mesh strainer but I really like the colander for this process then what you want to do is align your colander or your mesh strainer with some type of cheesecloth or in this case I'm using a flour sack towel I find these work wonderful and they're reusable which is nice if you've seen any of my bone broth videos I always use this to strain I use these cloths to strain my bone broth but if you want to go with cheesecloth and then discard it that's fine too and then very carefully because this is hot you want to strain this out into your call you're lined collander well this just looks glorious and I'll overlay a picture so that you can see it up close now what we want to do is we want to let this continue to strain for about 30 minutes or so that'll create a really nice creamy ricotta and if you want you can gather up these pieces like this and put a little string on it and get it maybe a wooden spoon and drape it over a pot and let it drip you can certainly do that if you want I don't find it really all that necessary I generally like to just leave it leave it be so that the curds don't get too compacted and just let it sit here and drain if you like a nice firm ricotta you're probably going to want to go a full hour if you like a little bit of more of a creamy ricotta then 30 minutes will be good and I'll show you what it looks like after after we've strained it for 30 minutes now you'll see in my bowl I've got some way down there well while this is continuing to strain and I also had to since I'm doing this in a bowl and not a nice big stockpot I had to remove some of the way from the bowl and this is what its gonna look like it'll have it'll look very watery and have a somewhat of a yellow tinge to it now don't throw this out now there are two types of way this is acidic way acidic way is what you get when you drain yogurt or you drain kefir or you make soft cheeses in the case of cottage cheese or ricotta cheese sweet whey on the other hand is the way that is the byproduct of making hard cheeses or cheese's where you use rennet now that sweet whey is very high in protein and often as what is used to deep be dehydrated and make a protein powder you may see in the stores whey protein powder that's usually made from sweet whey because it's very high in protein this way acid way or acidic way is not as high in protein it has a little protein in it but it's not as high as the sweet whey however it's very rich in vitamins and minerals so don't throw it out you can use it in place of water in various recipes like bread making or making rice or making grains this will work great you can also use this when you make bone broth it can be the acid that you use to help extract the collagen from the bones to make a gelatinous bone broth you can use this in place of the white vermouth or the red vermouth what the different fortified wines that I like to use you can use it in place of regular wine you can also use it in place of your vinegar now as to using this particular way in ferments I wouldn't recommend it I generally don't use whey when I make ferments but a lot of people do and if you're looking for that type of way you really would want to use the way that you would get from straining yogurt or kefir and the only reason is yes this is similar this is an acidic way it has been heated and it's been heated to a pretty good high temperature so I don't feel that it's as rich in the probiotics that really help get your fermentation kick-started so to speak and just as an aside I want to say something funny I've received comments where people have really gotten a kick out of how I say probiotics and I think that's why me maybe my New York accent coming through I'm not sure because I know a lot of you have sent me a phonetic ways of pronouncing it saying probiotics so yes probiotics or probiotics now your homemade ricotta this quick version of ricotta will stay fresh in your refrigerator for about five to seven days and now your way has a longer shelf life this will stay fresh in your refrigerator about six months and I want to say one more thing about this way you can put this back into your pot bring this up to a temperature that's either warm or hot add a little more vinegar and see if you can create even more homemade cheese from it because sometimes there is a little more that you can extract from this and in reality this is how real ricotta is made although not with the acidic way but the sweet way from the mozzarella making process but you can do that same process taking way adding a little more vinegar to once it's warmed and seeing if you can get any more curds out of it well I let this strain for about 30 minutes and it's perfect I'm going to take a picture and overlay it so you can see the consistency that we have it's just glorious and this can be used in any recipe that calls for ricotta cheese like the cheese that you would buy at the grocery store in the little carton you can use this for lasagna you can loot use this to stuff ravioli you can sweeten it and use it to fill cannolis anything like that Plus this is wonderful for just topping on crackers or a little sliced baguette with a drizzle of olive oil all of those will be perfect for using this cheese now let's give it a little taste and see how it came mmm oh it's perfect the flavor is perfect the amount of salt is perfect you're not getting any vinegar flavor and it's got that wonderful lush creamy texture that ricotta is known for if you'd like to learn how to make more homemade dairy products like ricotta cheese be sure to click on this video over here where I show you how to make homemade cottage cheese and homemade yogurt without a machine and I'll see you over there in my Texas Hill Country kitchen love and God bless [Music]

Channel: Mary's Nest

Views: 49,269

Rating: 4.9514008 out of 5

Keywords: How to Make Homemade Ricotta Cheese - The Easy Way!, How to make homemade Ricotta cheese, How to make homemade ricotta, Homemade ricotta cheese, Homemade ricotta, How to make ricotta cheese, How to make ricotta, How to make cheese, Ricotta cheese, Homemade ricotta recipe, Ricotta cheese at home, ricotta cheese help, ricotta cheese from scratch, ricotta cheese tips, ricotta cheese recipes, recipes with ricotta, how to make ricotta, making ricotta, marysnest, marys nest

Id: bDkn5SGKEaU

Length: 19min 23sec (1163 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 16 2020