How do you use homemade Ricotta?

[Iceblink]

I spread it between peices of French toast, it was pretty good. It's also good on a grilled cheese sandwich, especially if you add garlic and herbs.
And thin sliced apples. The apples make a nice crunchy contrast to all the cheezy goodness. You'll want to peel the apples though, the peel is an unpleasant suprise.

You are welcome to use my ideas, but please don't enter them in a contest, or publish them. I have this dream of winning a recipe contest with my made up creations.

 

[patandchickens]

For my class though I only have 1 1/2 hours. Pat is there a cheese I can make using just grocery store ingredients or should I just do a seasoned ricotta to spread on crackers?

If you only have that amount of time it's going to be hard to do anything other than a spread.

One option would be the whole-milk ricotta (and you will not have enough time left over to make it into a cheesecake, as it will take much of that time period just to get it to the point where you can hang it to drain and then it has to drain several hours so I am not sure you could really produce the finished product in that time frame -- try it at home and see?)

Another option would be a lemon-juice-curdled spreadable cheese (heat the milk to 190 F or so, add juice of 2 lemons, let sit 15 min til well curdled, then drain 1-2 hrs).

You can also make paneer or queso blanco from grocery-store ingredients (they are both nonmelting 'cooking/frying cheeses') BUT they have to drain for several hours and then you have to make something in which they're an ingredient, so that's probably not going to work for you.

If you were willing to practice a bunch of times at home, first, to get it working reliably (and it really does take practice to get it working reliably) and bought some rennet, you could make 30-minute mozzarella. (It actually takes more like an hour for me, possibly longer in a class situation).

The main problem is that most things, even yogurt cheese (spread) made from storeboughten yogurt, take hours or overnight to drain.

Good luck,

Pat

 

[Dace]

Pat, I could always make the ricotta salata....we could make the ricotta and set it up to drain, prep the container etc. and then the next week they could check the progress.

Making cheese was their request and I like the desire to learn so I hate to shoot down the idea...although I did warn them that it was an involved and lengthy process so I could just do a spread and they would be satisfied.

 

[patandchickens]

If you were willing to do that "salata-ing" so to speak, ricotta salata would definitely be edible the next week, if you wanted to go that direction.

Pat

 

[Dace]

OK, that sounds like a good plan! Thanks for all the advice!!