Lasagne/Lasagna cheese

[SlowRain]

What would be a good cheese for a relative beginner to make for lasagna?  I don't have any raw milk, cream, or rennet, but I do have pasteurized milk along with lemon juice, vinegar, and a yogurt culture.  Any suggestions or links to recipes?  Thanks.

[SOSEATTLE]

For the ricotta in lasagna, I always make my own. Tastes so much better than store bought. I usually use a recipe using buttermilk. It's so easy and always turns out. Here is an example: https://www.thespruceeats.com/homemade-ricotta-cheese-recipe-591554.

I have made mozzarella successfully, but generally purchase it or a local scamorza that I really like. Mozzarella is not easy to make for a beginner.

Susan

[SlowRain]

Thank you very much.  I know of one milk locally that isn't ultra-pasteurized, and I think I should be able to find a way to make my own buttermilk.  So this is something I can consider.

[EdwardMi]

Are there any alternatives to buttermilk that you think would work also, Susan?

[awakephd]

I believe you can make ricotta just using added acid, though it will be somewhat more bland than ricotta made from cultured milk/whey. I don't have a recipe on hand, as I usually only make ricotta from the whey left over after making cheese, but I'm thinking you would add the acid, then heat the milk - maybe someone else has a recipe on hand and can correct that as necessary. Heating the milk (or just whey) up to around 180-190* "denatures" it - frees the whey proteins which do not get captured by the rennet in making regular cheese. As it denatures, you can skim the protein from the top. The hotter you heat the milk or whey, the more solid these proteins will be, and if you get too hot, the ricotta will turn out a bit gritty rather than smooth. Either way, you will need to give the resulting proteins time to drain in butter muslin (don't use regular cheese cloth) for quite some time to get a smooth paste rather than a creamy mess.

[SOSEATTLE]

Are there any alternatives to buttermilk that you think would work also, Susan?

Andy is correct, you can also make ricotta using acid. When I first learned about cheese making, I took a class and one of the cheeses made was ricotta using citric acid. I think I still have the recipe around, but will have to look for it.

Susan

[SlowRain]

Andy is correct, you can also make ricotta using acid. When I first learned about cheese making, I took a class and one of the cheeses made was ricotta using citric acid. I think I still have the recipe around, but will have to look for it.

Do you think it would be easy to find?

[awakephd]

Here is the first recipe that came up in a Google search for DIY ricotta: https://www.thekitchn.com/how-to-make-homemade-ricotta-cheese-cooking-lessons-from-the-kitchn-23326

I have not tried this particular recipe, but it illustrates the basic idea - heat and acid. I would you can find variations on the recipe that include less heat (maybe 180° instead of 200°F), adding the acid before heating the milk, more or less acid, etc.

The one thing that I would add to the recipe from my own experience is that if the ricotta gets too dry, rather than stirring back in whey, I prefer to stir in some heavy cream.

[SlowRain]

Thanks. I'm a coffee person who knows not to trust non-coffee websites when it comes to making coffee or coffee-equipment recommendations. Same goes for rum recommendations, etc.  Now that I've found this forum, I'm a little reluctant to try a cooking website unless the recipe gets recommended by a certified curd nerd. 

[mikekchar]

If you have whole milk that's not ultra pasteurised and add citric acid to it (or distilled white vinegar), it will make curds.  You'll need more acid at lower temperatures than higher temperatures. If you keep it below 50C (122 F) it will leak less fat than if you do it cooler.  If you do it above 40 C (104 F) the curds will melt a bit and stick together.  I find 42 C to be a bit of a sweet spot in terms of retaining fat and clumping nicely.

Real ricotta is made with whey and coagulates the albumin in the whey rather than the casein.  It's very light.  It picks up a lot of flavour from the starter culture and because the whey contains a lot of lactose, ricotta is quite sweet.  "Ricotta" made from whole milk coagulates both the casein and the albumin.  You get a *lot* more yield (like 5-6x).  It's quite heavy, doesn't have any flavour from the starter (unless you decide the add some to the milk and ripen it for a couple of hours), and because the yield is quite high, it's much less sweet than real ricotta.  If you make "whole milk ricotta", use milk that's not ultra pasteurised and keep the temp below 50C, the cheese will melt in lasagne.  It ends up with a texture that is like mozzarella (if you look up "non-rennet mozzarella" you tube videos, you can see a handful of people confusing it for mozzarella -- it doesn't stretch properly, though because the bonds in the casein are not strong enough).  Real ricotta ends up drier and doesn't melt.  You usually mix it with cream or a white sauce when you add it to lasagne, so that it stays moist in cooking.

If you can only get UHT, then I recommend heating the milk up to nearly a simmer (don't burn it) and adding citric acid or distilled white vinegar.  You will end up with a drier curd that doesn't melt, but you'll use less acid than if you try to do it at a lower temp.  With UHT milk, the curd will *not* clump and you will get particle sizes more like real ricotta -- so make sure you have a tight weave cheese cloth.  I've made this kind of "ricotta" many times with UHT milk.  If you are almost boiling the milk anyway, you are denaturing the proteins in either case.  I don't recommend this, but if you just want to check it out with cheap milk, you might as well try it.

My last piece of advice is not to use lemon juice.  Lemon juice has a *very* variable amount of acid in it.  You sometimes need a prodigious amount to get the milk to break.  It also has a *lot* of sugar (it's one of the sweetest fruits -- you just don't notice it because it's so sour).  This makes a very sweet "ricotta" and IMHO it does not have a good flavour at all.  If you use citric acid powder, you'll need between 4-6 grams of powder dissolved in water per litre of milk (homogenised milk needs more acid for some reason).

Finally, if you get a wire basket (sometimes used for popcorn), you can hand roast coffee over one of those portable butane stoves (or even over your burner in your kitchen if you don't have smoke detectors in your house :-P ).  You want to keep the beans moving and keep it at a separation from the flame so as to time first crack to about 10 minutes (always best to roast to just past first crack when you are first starting so that you can get consistent -- after that you can just time it).  There will be a lot of smoke and some of the husks will catch fire, so doing it on pavement outside is a reasonably good idea.  You need to keep tossing the basket around to keep the beans moving the entire time.  It's very tiring.  After you get to the point you want it, then quickly dump it into a metal bowl and toss the beans in that until they cool down (it happens pretty quickly -- you want to cool them as quickly as possible).  Store the beans as normal and start grinding after the second day.  The most interesting period is usually around day 5 to about day 10.  It hangs on to some flavour until about day 15 or so and then quickly goes down hill (to the point where you wonder if this is really the same coffee).  I highly, highly, highly recommend doing this if you love coffee and don't have a roaster that will roast beans for you the same day (if they've been sitting in the shop for even a week, you've often lost most of the interesting period for the beans).

[SlowRain]

Once again, I am in your debt. Thank you very much.

I have discovered that I have reasonable access to HTST milk, so I should be good to go now.

[SlowRain]

This recipe worked just fine at 42°C.  I may have used a bit too much citric acid, so I'll have to pour a bit slower next time.  I actually don't know how well ricotta is supposed to melt in lasagna, but this softened up decently, and the flavor paired nicely.  Thanks again.

[mikekchar]

Awesome!  A cheese for you!

[awakephd]

Does ricotta melt? I don't use it often, and when I do it is generally to make canoli, so I've never really tried - but my guess is that it would not melt.

[mikekchar]

Normal ricotta doesn't, but the "ricotta recipe" that I gave SlowRain does.

Basically you take normal milk that you would use for cheesemaking and heat it to 42 C.  You dissolve 4-6 grams of citric acid in water and slowly add that solution a little bit at a time to the milk while stirring *slowly*.  I forgot to mention that you probably don't need all of the acid solution! (Sorry, SlowRain!)  Then you drain.  The trick here is that at 42 C, milk coagulates by acid at a pH of 5.1: which is just perfect for melting (and I think it actually rebounds a bit as the calcium phosphate in the curd is liberated -- so after a day or so, the pH will probably be 5.2 or so.  But I don't have a pH meter to verify this).  Since the milk is never raised to a high temperature, the proteins never denature and so the resultant cheese will melt.  Unfortunately it doesn't stretch very well because acid formed curds are too delicate.  If you try, it leaks fat like crazy.

Now, the cool thing about this is that if you tweak this recipe *just a bit* you can make a cheese you can age (which I call "Mistem cheese", but whose proper name I have discovered is queso secco).  Basically do exactly the same thing but after you heat the milk, add about 1.5% of the total volume of milk as yogurt (i.e. for each litre of milk, you add 15 grams of live yogurt).  Hold the temp for 1 hour to ripen the milk and develop flavour.  Then make your curds.

Try to consolidate the curds as best you can and transfer them to a cheese cloth lined basket (you can just use a collander or whatever you want for a basket).  Best to soak the cheese cloth in the whey before you line the basket so that the cheese doesn't stick to it.  Fold the cloth over the top of the curds and put a bamboo mat on top of that.  Immediately flip the cheese so that the bamboo mat is on the bottom and the basket is on the top.  Try to do this reasonably fast: so you've put the curds in the basket and you flip it within 5 minute.  This is because the curds are hot and they will form a skin that later won't stick to things.  If you wait too long, it won't form the skin.  Wait 15 minutes and flip again, so that the basket is on the bottom.  Wait 30 minutes and flip again (bamboo mat on the bottom now).  Wait an hour and flip again.  Wait another hour and flip again.  Take a look at the cheese and decide if you think it needs another hour or if it is solid enough (it won't be totally closed, without cracks, but it can get pretty close).

After 3 to 4 hours of flipping, dry salt the cheese.  Weigh the cheese (it will be about 150 grams per litre of milk you used -- ironically more if you use homogenised milk).  Measure about 1.25% of the weight of the cheese in non-iodised salt (i.e. sea salt) (or about 1.8 - 2.0 grams per litre of milk you used).  Rub the salt all over the cheese and then let it sit for an hour.  Then do it again (i.e. 2 applications of the same amount of salt separated by 1 hour).  Let the cheese drain for another hour.

Get a plastic tupperware style box that your cheese will fit into and is about 3 times the volume of your cheese.  This will be about 500 ml per litre of milk that you originally used.  So if you used 2 litres of milk and made a 300 gram cheese, the box should hold a volume of about 1 litre.  (The size is not super crucial for this cheese, so just try to find something approximate).  Cut a bamboo mat to fit the box (pro tip: don't cut the strings ;-) ).  Boil the bamboo mat and sterilise the box somehow. Put the bamboo mat in the box, put the cheese on top of that and close the lid.  Put the whole thing in your normal fridge.

Every day, flip the cheese and wipe out the box.  If you get mold, wipe it off with a brine solution containing a bit of vinegar.  This cheese has no rind and so when you wipe the cheese, the outside will kind of dissolve.  This is not bad: the stuff that your wipe around will fill up the cracks, a bit like making a stilton cheese.  If you wipe it fairly regularly (say once a week), you will have no cracks on the outside.  This cheese is always really dense as well, so you will have virtually no mechanical holes in the centre.

You can eat the cheese within a week as a fresh cheese (in which case I believe it is called a queso blanco), or you can age it for up to several months (when it is called a queso secco).  The longest I ever aged it was 3 months and it was really, really good.  The cheese also melts fairly nicely and you can use it on potatoes or whatever (I don't think it would make a very good grilled cheese, though, because the cheese doesn't stretch).

I made this type of cheese for a year before I ever got into making rennet cheeses.  It also makes an *amazing* blue cheese (though it doesn't get veins because the paste is too dense -- don't try to piece it because the cheese will just crumble on you).  Rennet cheeses are way more versatile, but if you don't have access to rennet this is a really great way to go (and you develop a lot of normal cheese making skills along the way).