Ricotta di Capra, Kinda: Simple White Cheeses

Anyone who pays the mental prices for the crappy imported ricotta you can find in the marts here is outta their mind. In fact, thanks to the FTA, there are a lot of ‘new’ cheeses popping up on the shelves in Korea these days that you’d have to be crazy to pay import prices for. I’m just saying. Think of how you’re paying three or four times the price for a cheese that’s meant to be eaten within days, if not hours, of being made, which instead traveled thousands of miles to get here.

That having been said, although you can create a ricotta-like cheese at home in about 30 minutes, start to finish, it’s not exactly ricotta.

Ricotta, which literally means “recooked,” is not technically made from milk directly, but from the whey that results from the making of other cheeses. The whey, a bright-yellow liquid that separates out from the curd (which becomes the cheese), is left to ferment for a few days and then reheated again with an acidic component to release even more curds, which become the ricotta. Hence the name.

Now, I got an earful about this from an Italian chef on a five-hour drive to Gwangyang once, but I’m of the opinion that desperate times call for desperate measures and, while I will probably get around to making proper ricotta someday when I have more time and it’s less hot in the kitchen, I think the kind of not-really-ricotta you can make with whole milk serves just fine.

I’ve seen it called farmer cheese before, but farmer cheese can also have other meanings. So I don’t know what to properly call it. Wikipedia calls it whole milk ricotta and says it is “primarily popular in the USA, where whey ricotta is known by the name riccottone.” Okay. USA.

To further complicate things, fake ricotta is basically real paneer, but paneer is usually pressed or chilled to give it a more solid form. Fake ricotta is also real small curd cottage cheese, but slightly more drained. It is also queso blanco, but slightly less drained. Basically, learning how to do this one simple thing with milk will solve a lot of Korea-related cheese woes all at once. And all you need is a carton of milk and some lemon juice, a little salt, a thermometer and some cheesecloth.

There have been so many times in the past when I’ve skimmed ingredient lists for recipes and then just given up after seeing too many things I thought I couldn’t get in Korea, which is really what propelled me further and further down the homemade rabbit hole. I got tired of giving up on recipes and started researching what ingredients really were instead. There are a lot of things I wish I had known six or seven years ago, especially before the FTA (which is bad, by the way — just so we’re clear) opened up the market and more foreign ingredients started making their way in. But now, even though I can technically find some of the stuff I’ve learned to make myself in the shops, the knowledge remains a valuable resource for avoiding big business and not having to go to the chaotic hole of suck that is a big mart. Plus, it just tastes better.

Ricotta, real or American, is usually made from either sheep’s milk or cow’s milk, but I like fake ricotta di capra (goat’s milk ricotta) best. It’s lighter and more spreadable without being soggy, and it has an extra layer of funk to it, which kind of makes up for the fact that it’s not fermented (I find that fake cow’s milk ricotta basically tastes like nothing, which is fine — sometimes it’s a textural component you’re going for more than flavor).

Goat’s milk is not an entirely easy thing to find here in Korea, but it pops up from time to time in the organic sections at marts and the little organic and “organic” chains that are sprouting up like weeds all over Seoul. If you don’t know, just look for a lot of unfinished wood and green paint — these places seem to all have the same interior designer. I got mine with the peaches at Orga this weekend.

Any goat’s milk you find is probably not going to be UHT (ultra-high temperature) pasteurized, which is the one thing you really need to watch when making any kind of cheese or yogurt. If you were really, really doing this the proper way, your milk would not be pasteurized at all. Which is why, as I keep trying to explain to B, we really need a cow. But full-fat, non-UHT pasteurized milk will suffice. To check whether or not the milk you’re holding is UHT pasteurized, check the back label for a temperature. If the temperature on the label is under 100 degrees C, you should be okay, but something closer to 74 is even better. A lot of the popular milk brands in Korea are UHT, which is why foreigners get freaked out by how long it can sit in the fridge without going off and also why there are so many complaints about the milk not tasting like milk. UHT is good at killing things, including some good bacteria and flavor. It also screws with the proteins, which is why using it to make cheeses or yogurt isn’t the best idea. I’ve heard it can be done, though, if you’d really like to push it.

If you want really good cheese or yogurt, find a co-op or organic shop with organic milk (유기농 우유) — you can even find some brands at the marts and smaller neighborhood shops, but I recommend the co-op stuff because they usually have the area where the cows are raised labeled on the bottle and — if I’m lying, I’m dying — there’s an honest-to-god clear difference in flavor between the different areas (milk from cows grazed along the Seomjin River in Jeollanam-do is extremely sweet and light, while Jeju cow milk is buttery and rich). So you can try a few and find a milk you really like.

And don’t use low-fat milk. Ever. For anything.

Cheesecloth is all over the damn place in this country, if you know what to look for. A lot of the time it’s labeled for use in steaming, instead. I was lucky enough to find a drawstring bag made of cheesecloth, which makes draining my cheese an effortless task (I just hang it from the cabinet). It’s never in the same place twice, it seems, so check near the baking section, the kitchen tools section and even near the foil and paper plates.

So that’s plain white cheese, 101. And way more than I meant to write about milk.

Actually useful information below.

Oh, one more thing, though: if you do make cheese, save the whey. It gives great flavor to bread when you use it in place of the water in your recipe, and you can also use it  in smoothies (like whey powder) or to condition your hair (it’s full of protein).

Or to make legit ricotta.

Ricotta Kinda