welcome friends today in the kitchen we are making ricotta or ricotta which is
fresh cheese made from way at least in the sort of og original old-school way
it's made from way and whey is what's left over from cheese making so in a
previous episode we made two kinds of cottage cheese one made with vinegar and
one made with a rennet which has left us with two pots of whey and you can tell
them apart because the pot that is a really white opaque way was made with
vinegar and the one that's sort of clear and yellow was made with a rennet now
most online recipes for ricotta say to take whole milk heat it up put in an
acid either vinegar or lemon juice and then skim out the the curds and that's
your ricotta that is more akin to a cottage cheese which is what we made in
the last episode here and you don't even have to add anything at this point I'm
just gonna bring these up to about a hundred and eighty degrees Fahrenheit
and the cheese is just going to appear all on its own so let's watch that
process happen so I don't know if the camera can pick it up but we're at about
155 degrees Fahrenheit and you can already see the little curds forming in
this pot just give it a couple more minutes and you'll notice a real
difference okay now you should be able to see it
look at all those curds starting to come together and you can see the way is
starting to turn into that yellowy clear liquid that we have here with this
rennet version there's not much there's not much coming together in this one yet
so this pot at the front we're gonna get quite a bit of ricotta out of it and I
suspect that's because we got so little cottage cheese out of it in the first
process this second pot I don't think I'm going to get much ricotta out of it
at all and that's probably because I had such a high yield of cheese in the first
place so I'm gonna try something gonna add a little bit of acid this is
vinegar mixed with water and I'm just gonna mix this in and this is probably
why so many online recipes tell you to add milk or cream to your way to
increase the yield because I have to suspect that if you're boiling real way
from real cheese-making there's not much protein left and you're
gonna have to you're gonna have to cook a lot away to make any ricotta okay so
it's time to scoop this out now you can pour it into a cheesecloth line sieve or
do as I'm doing here and pull it out with a little sieve I'm scooping it out
because I've got to tell you we've got so much going on in the studio today I'm
out of giant bowls so I've got I've got a bunch of these really fine mesh scoops
and so I'm just gonna scoop this out and get as much as I can now this one the
curd is forming very small amounts of curd so I have to say for this amount of
way if you're doing a traditional cheese and you've only made a small little
amount I made like a liter and a half of milk into cheese trying to make ricotta
not worth it but if you are making the acid-based cottage cheese then making
ricotta afterwards definitely is and if you're making the acid based ricotta
from whole milk take that first one don't call it reco to call it cottage
cheese and then do this process and you'll actually have ricotta so I think
all of those other recipes stopped short of where they should but let's get
Julian here and taste test okay so we this is the ricotta then this is some
guess is it ricotta ricotta ricotta ricotta ricotta I don't know there's so
many different ways to say it I hear all because it's the way cheese this is the
this is wave cheese this is way cheesy yes so this is this is
he's made from way which is the leftover from the other cheese making processes
all right so just looking at it very quickly this one looks much creamier yep
than this one okay I have no good feeling okay I'm assuming when it's
purchase so yeah one is one is store-bought what a store-bought and one
I made so let's just first super creamy um it's got a tang to it
yep anything else again mouthfeel for me i it's got a grainy gritty yeah almost
like not quite Sam it does make me want to guess that it it's okay the homemade
no guessing that's supposed to do right yeah we'll taste both first so
you've used the same spoon
oh so this one has this one is more bland yes then this one yep I like the
texture on this one the texture is firm on this one whereas
this one is this one's creamier but it's got that that grit to me I find though
that I find this one I like the flavor of this one better I like the flavor
this one better yeah me too I like that better meet you store-bought homemade
really yep I'm surprised because though when we did the the way that you majors
from came from you making cottage cheese right yes and that cottage cheese when
you made it provide a gritty flavor made the cottage cheese that it came from had
a gritty Flint gritty texture to it and which is why I thought oh it's gritty it
must be the same but no no no this is interesting so but that's the flavor
that's in the cottage cheese that you made from this way so I think it I think
it took the flavor out yes and left you this behind yes hmm so there's there's
it almost makes me feel that there's something going on with the store-bought
that they're they're making it to a flavor profile if they want maybe
whereas this is it could also be that the store-bought they were making it
purposefully versus yes seeing a second product so you've already taken off
something uh which could which could be I mean if we could find authentic real
ricotta I mean this is this is what's available in the store cannabis can in a
supermarket ricotta yeah so I mean it you know I feel it trip to some cheese
making nation yeah and but you know listen I mean and it's not bad
I would I would cook what not I would definitely cook with that and I and the
flavor is okay it's just that flavor is better but that textures better
so dig knowing take from it what you will
yes there's no clear winner in this in this case I don't think thanks for
stopping by today okay I need a shot just