The Simplest Home-made Ricotta

I saw the program Bills Food on TV yesterday and decided that his recipe for Ricotta and Herbs Roasted Chicken looks pretty innovative and good.

I usually put butter under the skin of my roast chicken so that it will crisp and brown beautifully.

But Bill Granger said on the program that he felt using butter made the roast chicken a little heavy and that he found ricotta does the job much better. I didn't think butter made my roast chicken very heavy but using ricotta sounded really quite interesting.. and healthy.

And then I remembered reading about people making their own ricotta cheese at home from various blogs (Here, here, here and here) so I thought perhaps I can do it too..

The recipes for homemade ricotta cheese were really quite varied.

Some blogs say use whole milk and lemon. Others milk, heavy cream and vinegar... or lemon.. or buttermilk. Some's instructions were to boil the milk with the acid.. others to boil the milk first then pour in the acid.. Some advised allowing the milk and acid to curdle for 15 minutes.. others for up to 2 hours.

Reading all these different recipes made me a little confused.. but it also gave me the impression that homemade ricotta is something that is hard to go too wrong. So I decied to go ahead and try making it at home today.

Of course, in the end, I decided to choose the easiest recipe of all. Milk + lemon + curdling for just 15 minutes. (The detailed steps can be found here so I won't bother to go into details.)

Here is my home-made ricotta cheese.

Yummy home-made ricotta cheese.

I'm going to try making my own mascarpone cheese next!

According to various websites, it stays fresh for 2 to 5 days..  But I'm using mine tomorrow for the Ricotta and Herbs Roasted Chicken. :)