Making ricotta cheese
Ricotta is a type of soft cheese that is extracted after we make the first cheese, the amount of ricotta that can be extracted from the whey could be about one tenth of the volume of the first cheese, but it could very a lot.
Ricotta making the old ways
Welcome to my hub, making ricotta cheese
Dear readers, in our previous article we
have talked about cheese and how we made cheese in the small farms when I was
young, in this hub we will be talking about ricotta cheese; but, first of all
what is ricotta cheese and why it is different from normal cheese one may ask;
you see, ricotta cheese is a 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 extracted the
cheese a second time, in order to extract whatever we can 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, because 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, so 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
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 made ricotta cheese then, that is the
way that my grandma taught me a very long time ago; I now that you are
thinking, what is the use to know that, since we are not going to make ricotta
ourselves, because we can just buy the ricotta and eat it from the shop
nowadays, it is a lot easier 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 when
I was young, I am going to tell you how we made ricotta cheese my grandma way
anyhow.
----------------------------------
Here are links on the web that explain
about ricotta cheese
What Is Ricotta?
What is ricotta cheese?
« Baking Bites
-----------------------------------------
Ricotta making the old ways
So, let us go back to when I have made
cheese in our previous hub, at the end of which I have replaced all 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 My farm
life chapter, 7 .
First of all 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 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, and 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.
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 whole some 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.
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, 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, 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.
---------------------------------------------
No comments:
Post a Comment