Making ricotta cheese
A dishful of ricotta. for those that don't know ricotta is a second sort of cheese that we can make from milk, it is usually used fresh.
A dishful of ricotta. for those that don't know ricotta is a second sort of cheese that we can make from milk, it is usually used fresh.
Ricotta making the old ways
Welcome to page (30), making ricotta cheese
Dear readers, in
our previous article, we have talked about cheese and how we made cheese in the
small farms of southern Italy when I was young, in this hub we will be talking
about how we made ricotta cheese; but first of all, let us explain where the
name ricotta comes from and why it is called ricotta. So, you may ask what
ricotta cheese is and why it is different from normal cheese; you see, ricotta
cheese is a soft type of cheese extracted from the whey that is left after
making normal cheese. The name ricotta is an Italian name because it means what
it says; in Italian ricotta means that you are cooking it a second time, and
that is exactly what happens when we make ricotta, we are cooking again that
whey from that batch of milk that we have already used and extracted the normal
cheese; we use a different procedure of course when we re-cook the whey a
second time, in order to extract whatever is left in it and we are able to
extract from that whey.
Now, we need also
to say that this hub is being written with a double view in mind, one of which
is to tell you my life story and what I did when I was young, since this is the
story of my life as well, so, I am telling you the story of my life and how I
had to cope with all those things that I had to do in those hard times just to
live a normal everyday life. I know that there might not be much to learn from
this hub for the general public today, because these things have changed a lot
since then and this is not a cooking show, where you can learn how to cook
certain things; and anyhow it would be hard for the general public to be in a
position to make ricotta, where could they collect enough whey to make ricotta
cheese? You see what I am writing here is the old way of making ricotta cheese,
therefore it is history; and today things are done in a different way, but so
what! We can still use this story to compare the old ways of life with today
ways of life. Therefore, this is still a story that could be told and anyhow we
can still learn something from it, since there are people that don’t know
anything about how to make cheese or ricotta cheese and where they come from,
so, for some people it could be interesting just to know how ricotta could be
made, so let me tell you how ricotta cheese was made, in the small farms of
Southern Italy when I was young.
So, let me tell you
how ricotta was made then the way that my grandma taught me when I was young.
As you all know, in
one of my last hubs, I have been telling you how we made cheese a long time ago
in the small farms of southern Italy, in this hub I am going to tell you
how we used the whey that was left over from the cheese and made ricotta
cheese, that is the way that my grandma taught me a very long time ago; I know
that you are thinking now, what is the use to know that, since we are not going
to make ricotta ourselves, because we don’t have the whey to start with and we
can just buy ricotta and eat it from the shop nowadays, it is a lot easier and
perhaps even cheaper and enjoyable to do that. Okay I know what you mean, but
just to compare the ways of life of today with the ways of life we had when I
was young, which I believe life was a lot harder then, I am going to tell you
how we made ricotta cheese my grandma way anyhow.
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Here are links on
the web that explain about ricotta cheese
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Ricotta making the old ways
So, let us go back
to when I have made cheese in our previous article, at the end of which I have
collected all the whey and replaced the whey in the large kettle and I was
ready to make ricotta, so let us start making ricotta cheese my grandma way,
you can check out how we made cheese at our hub Cheese making, this is the
link, Cheese making
First of all we had
to rekindle the fire and make sure that you have enough fire wood for the whole
procedure, then lift the large kettle and whey on this three legged devise on
the fire and start warming the whey slowly and steadily, as the whey warms up
you need to turn this wooden devise around and around in a slow motion always
in the same direction, this wooden devise is only a simple stick with a larger
end, and although it is simple it has been made perhaps from elm-wood or some
very high grade wood as it is an utensil purposely made and it is going to last
for a very long time, perhaps for generations, this wooden utensil has a larger
rounded end, and you need to turn it around in the same direction as I said
with the larger end dragging softly on the bottom of the kettle, so that any
ricotta that is forming while the whey warms up does not stick to the bottom of
the kettle.
While the whey
warms up and you keep turning this wooded devise, this procedure will reach a
stage when you can see that some very fine flakes of ricotta are forming in the
whey, this is the stage when you need to set the ricotta to rise at the top of
the whey, how can we do that you may ask? This can be achieved by adding about
half a litre of goat milk to the whey, while you continue to turn your wooden
devise as described before, this action of adding this goat milk should set a
reaction to the forming ricotta in the whey and it will rise to the top.
This is how it is
done and if you follow this method and you add just goats’ milk you end up with
a beautiful soft and very tasty ricotta cheese, but if you want more ricotta
cheese than usual, then you have to add to the whey some acid stuff that you
have made yourself, (usually this was some old acid whey that we kept in a
bottle from the previous ricotta making) anyhow, in the country where they make
ricotta you may be able to buy this acid stuff from the chemist, with this
stuff from the chemist you can make at least twice as much ricotta, but the
quality will not be as good as when you use just plain goat milk.
Anyhow let us go
back to make this ricotta cheese; and here you need to continue to turn the wooden devise around even more slowly for a few
more minutes; you have to take it slower because you don’t want to mix the
rising ricotta to the whey again, and when you see that all this ricotta has
come to the top of the whey, you can slowly take out the wooden devise from the
kettle, then lift down the hot kettle and you are ready to collect your own
ricotta, which is now at the top of the whey for you to collect.
Collecting your own ricotta
At the time when I
was young the new hot ricotta would be collected in small woven baskets that
would let the rest of the whey out while the ricotta was cooling down, we
collected it with a sort of colander with handle from the top of the whey, at
the end of all this work sometimes we would leave a bit of ricotta for
ourselves, and we used it in the following manner: you see, in the farms of
those days you had to think for yourself what you were going to eat next time
you had to eat, so this was just another way to make a warm meal quickly.
Usually in the farms of those days there was always plenty of dry old
bread that would be hard to eat the way it was, so, we would slice the bread
and put it in a large dish, and then we would put the still hot ricotta and a
bit of whey on top of this dish filled with old bread; this rustic prepared
dish usually would replace a whole meal during the day. Okay, you might be
shocked and spew that this was a prepared dish of wholesome food, but hey it
was either that or just old dry bread, I hope you see what I mean, and I am
pretty sure that if you were in the same position, you would prefer this warm
dish to just dry old bread; believe it or not that is how hard life was in
those old times; so we all should be thankful to the progress that we have
achieved since then.
Anyhow, let us
complete our task that we were doing, at this point of time the whey in the
kettle is still hot, it has got to be because to make ricotta, we had to warm
the whey to a very high temperature just below boiling point, so, I have one
last use for this hot whey before I finish with it; I have to dip the fresh
cheese that I have made in our last hub into it for say half a minute or so,
and this is a sort of pasteurisation for the new cheese.
I know that now you
are saying, this procedure about cheese and ricotta cheese making is very
boring; I hope you have finished with it now, because we don’t see the use of
knowing all this stuff thank you very much. Sorry to disappoint you because I
still have to explain that in those days even the whey had to be put to good
use, it has always been so in farming, the main rule in farming is; waste not
want not, so what we did with the whey was this, we could give small drinks of
it to cats and dogs, it had to be small drinks otherwise it would make them
sick. The rest of the whey was good for the pigs to drink and to mix with
coarse milled grains to feed them. Yes, you guessed it right once again the
farmers don’t like to waste anything at all, and the pigs are the saving bank
of all farm foods that would otherwise go to waste.
Now that I have
described to you this cheese making and ricotta cheese making, I start to feel
that I might have said enough about my farm life in the town of Genzano di Lucania, so let me see what else is there to tell you: Yes
there are a few more things to tell you, like wine making the old ways, the
heritage chapter and the Madonna story and others things, we are going to do
this before we leave the town that I was born and lived my young life. After
that we are going to talk about my life experiences as a migrant to this land
of opportunities Australia. See you soon, in our hub; Wine making the old ways.
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