Home Creamery: Ricotta Salata
July 29, 2009 · 8 comments
A couple of weeks ago I was out at Kookoolan Farms to take a goat cheese class. While I was there I picked up a nice basket mold for ricotta salata. Raw goat milk was available at a nearby farm. I had everything I needed to try to make ricotta salata.
I decided to follow, more or less, the instructions in Jam It, Pickle It, Cure It
The curds are fairly fragile at first, so I carefully ladled them into a colander line with butter muslin. 
Then I used a food-safe rubber band to make the muslin into a bag and hang it from the skimmer to let the cheese drain.
After an hour, I carefully transferred the curds to the ricotta mold. I used a bit of plastic over the cheese, then set a plate on top and a can of tomatoes on the plate to use as a weight.
The instructions say to remove the cheese from the mold after an hour and turn it over. That didn’t seem reasonable because of the shape of the mold, so I added more weight and continued to press the cheese for about 8 hours.
When I was satisfied that it was drained as thoroughly as it would be, I unmolded the cheese and salted it liberally with cheese salt. Then I wrapped it in cheesecloth and put it into the refrigerator. Every couple of days for the next two weeks I salted the cheese and changed the cheesecloth.
The cheese turned out very tasty and fairly creamy, with a slight hint of goaty-ness. It isn’t a grateable cheese, but that’s just a matter of continuing to age it before tasting.
Overall, I’m rather pleased with the result, especially because this was my first attempt at making a semi-hard cheese. Now that I know cheesemaking isn’t really all that difficult, I’ll try some longer-aging cheeses.
My name is Gareth Mark, and I live in Portland, Oregon. I've been a line cook a few times and worked several years as a pastry chef.
Yum. It looks amazingly good!
Forgive my simple question but I don’t know a thing about making cheese and it sounds very interesting. Can you use pasteurized goats milk to make the cheese?
That is so cool.
Which milk do you prefer best in terms of flavor?
Muh!!!!!
fantastic!
I like to make it with bufalo milk ! more fat…and Iusualy prepaire fill with smoke….
Thanks! I was really pleased that my first attempt at a molded cheese turned out so well. It’s really much easier than I had feared it would be.
You can use pasteurized milk, just not ultra-pasteurized. Any milk will work fine, cow, goat, or sheep. Probably buffalo as well if you can get it. I used goat milk because I had some raw goat milk to use. I had originally planned to use cow milk. It would have worked fine, but tasted different.
It depends on the cheese. For ricotta I prefer cow milk, but for ricotta salata, I really like the result from raw goat milk.