One of the most common questions I get when I mention I make cheese is “Wow, I’d love to make cheese! What should I start with?” to which the best answer is pretty much “ricotta”, or if you have a Central European grandparent, “pot cheese”.

Here’s why:

• Ricotta is nearly foolproof and doesn’t require any special equipment.
• Homemade ricotta is obviously different from and better than commercial ricotta–no weird, pithy texture, no stabilizers, just soft, pillowy goodness. Quick, easy wins are good when you’re a complete n00b–they give you the boost of confidence and interest to keep going.
• Making a batch of cow ricotta and another from goat milk (and sheep, if you can get it) is a great way to get a sense for the differences between different milk types. There are flavor differences, as I mentioned in my post on Pecorino, but they also coagulate differently and you’ll get different amounts of ricotta from the same amount of milk. The size and texture of the curds will be different. These are all useful things to get a feel for before you start playing around with other, more complicated types of cheese.

You’ll find the ricotta recipe near the beginning of pretty much every cheese cookbook, and there are hundreds of recipes for making it all over the Internet. And therein lies the rub: the myriad different recipes vary wildly, which can be pretty overwhelming and confusing for someone who’s just trying to figure out where to start.

The good news is, they’ll all work, just with slightly different results.

Let’s start with the basic ingredients:

Milk. The level of milkfat in the pot affects yield. You can use either 2% or whole milk, both will work. You’ll just get a lower yield with 2% and of course it will have a less creamy mouthfeel.

The milk can be raw or pasteurized. It absolutely doesn’t matter. You’ll be blowing past pasteurization temperatures on your way to making ricotta in any case, so don’t go out of your way to pay extra for raw milk. Pasteurization is a function of both temperature and time, and the relationship is not linear. Here’s the time-temp scale for pasteurizing milk:

• Low-temp or vat pasteurization: 145F (63C) for 30 minutes
• High temp, short time (HTST): 161F (72C) for 15 seconds
• Higher heat, shorter time (HHST): 191F (88C) 1 second

When you make ricotta, you’ll be heating the milk to ~195F and holding it there for 10-20 minutes. So if you come across that recipe from that guy who tells you to get raw milk and then pasteurize it for 30 minutes before you continue with the recipe, ignore him and absolutely anything he says on the subject of milk or cheese forever.

Cream? Many recipes will tell you to add cream to the milk. The proportion of cream to milk ranges from 1/4 cup to 1 gallon, to (in one remarkable recipe) 2 cups of cream to 4 cups of milk. At that point you’re halfway to cream cheese, but hey, go for it if that’s what you want. You don’t actually need to add cream at all if you don’t want or don’t happen to have any on hand. Remember that ricotta is often made from whey left over from making a batch of cultured rennet cheese, from which most of the solids, both fats and proteins, have been removed. And you can make ricotta with 2% milk. Cream is just about yield and mouthfeel.

Note I’ve been noticing a number of brands have started adding carrageenan or other gums to cream to make it appear thicker when poured. I’ve even encountered it in one brand of goat milk. So, weird as it may seem, make sure to look at the ingredients list for your milk and cream. It should be just milk or cream, nothing else.

Incidentally, cow milk is the only kind from which the cream separates out easily. So your options when making goat ricotta are either (a) don’t worry about adding any cream–goat milk is higher in fat than cow milk anyway, or (b) add cow cream. Especially if you’re making goat ricotta for the purpose of seeing how it’s different from cow ricotta, I advise A. Sheep milk? It’s got twice as much fat as cow milk. Don’t even think about adding cream.

Acid There are range of options here: citric acid, lemon juice and white vinegar are the most common. I linked to a recipe using white vinegar in the post about Pecorino simply because it’s something that most people have ready access to, and the acidity levels are pretty uniform across brands. You can also use buttermilk.

By now it should be pretty clear that there’s a huge amount of room for experimentation.

Things most recipes don’t tell you, but which are actually fairly important:

You can make two batches. If you’re starting from milk and not whey, the first application of acid will loosen the bonds that keep the solids in solution, but once you skim out the curds, you’ll still have a fairly cloudy whey in the pot. Add a second batch of acid and wait another 10-20 mins. You’ll typically get a larger yield from the second batch than the first, though it will be slightly lower in fat. (Some people add an extra cup of milk or 1/4-1/2 c of cream to the pot before adding the second batch of acid for this reason.) Just mix it in with the first batch after it’s drained.

Draining Cheesecloth isn’t always easy to find in your average supermarket. Sometimes you’ll find it in the section with cooking utensils. But you can easily order some from Amazon (Grade 90 or 100 is fine). You can also use a clean linen towel (flat weave, not the bumpy ones) or cut a square from an old all-cotton sheet or pillow case a bit larger than your colander. Boil it before you use it to sanitize it, and make sure it’s wet before you put the curds in it so they don’t stick to it. After you’re done, rinse any clinging curds from the cloth with COLD water (hot water will make them stick harder). And then you can just throw it in the wash with other clothes and some chlorine bleach for next time.

Then give Ep 2 (the overview of cheesemaking) another listen, and see how it hits after you’ve done it once.