What's Cooking in Carolina?

Mainly creative menus and recipes (usually healthy) and always from scratch with tips for party planning, theme parties, weddings and decorating tips so you can give swank parties or dinners to delight your guests from a part time caterer, owner/operator of a coming soon Entree Vous, but mainly a cook and eater who grows much of her own food and loves to laugh.

Sunday, March 05, 2006

Homemade Ricotta, Ravioli with Ricotta, Ricotta Fritters

While watching the Olympics and flipping through food magazines, I found a recipe for making your own ricotta cheese. Included was several recipes utilizing ricotta. The most appealing to me was a ricotta filled ravioli with poppy seed brown butter sauce topped with asparagus and ricotta salata. After watching the Olympics and all of the information on Italy, I wanted to eat something Italian and doesn't this just sound yummy? They also had a recipe for stuffing chicken breasts with a ricotta and spinach mixture, which I have made something very similar to and it was very good. So it's off to the grocery store to get the milk and buttermilk to make ricotta. That ought to be fun. I'll let you know how it goes and what I end up making with it.

I'm back. The ricotta cheese was quite easy to make. It probably only took less than an hour from start to finish. You take 1 gallon of milk (I used skim) and 5 cups buttermilk (I used low fat) and cook, stirring, until it reaches 170.
Then you quit stirring (important) until it reaches 190. Strain in 5 layers of moistened cheese cloth over a colander (over a bowl if you want to save the whey). After about 5 minutes, you take the cheese cloth and tie it in a knot and hang it over the sink to drain another 15 minutes.
Take it out of the cheesecloth, you put it in a lidded storage container with a bit of salt added and use within about 4 days.

The texture of the ricotta is competely different that that which you buy in tubs at
the grocery store. It is less moist. You have to flake it with a fork. We liked it though.

I tried the recipe for the ravioli mentioned above and pictured here.
It was very good, yet I can imagine how much richer it would have been had I used more fatty
ingredients. It was yummy; one of those dished where you can keep eating and eating
until you are stuffed. I took some of the remaining ricotta and make
ricotta fritters. We'll have them tonight and I'll add a picture, if I get a decent one. Here it is:


That's it for now. Try more recipes from our recipes of the week Swank Recipes and send us a note, we would love to hear from you!

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