What do you do with soured milk? Make cheese!!! I typically make my own cheese salsa dip (recipe near bottom of this post) these days, but for some time now, I’ve been wanting to make a batch of wild-herbed ricotta. I was making my son’s Caesar salad dressing this morning when I observed that the heavy cream we bought, (a 1 litre) had started cheesing itself! I finished his salad dressing and poured the rest into a pot. It appeared to be roughly half the usual volume for making my full recipe for ricotta, so I cut the salt and lemon juice by half too.
After straining, I noticed this was a finer curd cheese and decided not to make more cheese sauce with it. Instead, I would try a wild herbed cheese instead! I put in a pinch or two of Desert Parsley, ground pine needle, and offered a taste test to my daughter. I could go two ways with this she said, make a cheesecake out of it, because of how sweet it was tasting, or savour it up a bit with mustard weed or peppergrass. I went with the peppergrass, grinding some out of the pepper grinder it’s in onto the lump. The ball still has a bit of sweetness as an aftertaste, but otherwise, it even passed the taste test with my son, who isn’t the easiest to please.
I’m guessing my pinches amounted to roughly 1/8th of a teaspoon of each herb for this half batch of wild-herbed ricotta. If you like stronger flavours, just increase the amount of herb.
This is my recipe for taking heavy cream (10% / half’n/half / etc, not whipping cream if there added ingredients) and making ricotta cheese from it.
Heavy Cream Ricotta Cheese
Ingredients
1 litre of Heavy Cream
1/4 cup lemon juice concentrate
1 tspn salt
Instructions
Pour heavy cream into sauce pan and starting on low, slowly increase the temperature while stirring. When you see steam escaping, add your thermometer, I use a long-stemmed meat thermometer.
Continue stirring and slowly increasing the temperature until the thermometer reaches 180F. Remove from heat and stir in the lemon juice. You should notice it curdling immediately. Stir in the salt and allow to cool for half hour or so.
Set up your draining station. For me, that is an upside down wire dogfood holder over top of a bowl with my homemade doubled cheesecloth made from curtain sheers, tied to the four feet. I actually pre-tie my knots on these squares and just loop them over the wire feet, giving a few twists to the corner if I made the squares too big (which I did for a few of my cheesecloth pairs).
Pour your cheese into your cheesecloth and allow to drip. When you don’t see anymore or very few drips, unloop your cheesecloth, gather it together and grasp above the lump of cheese and squeeze out as much of the remaining whey as you can.
You are now ready to dress it up as you please. Some add more salt, some add herbs, some add a bit of liquid smoke, etc.
For this recipe, based on my happy experiment, I’d add a half teaspoon each of the following:
Salt
Powdered pine needle
Crushed desert parsley
Ground peppergrass from the pepper grinder.
My daughter’s idea of a cheesecake made me think of adding one of my wild syrups to the cheese such as fir, chokecherry, saskatoon berry, or pine mugolio and making a wild-flavoured cheesecake. I might try that idea the next time there is a heavy cream container cheesing itself in the fridge.
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