Homemade Ricotta

Today we made some homemade ricotta...so easy to make and much more delicious than store-bought! All you need is a half gallon of organic whole milk, 3 tablespoons of white vinegar, 1/2 teaspoon Kosher salt, and cheesecloth. This recipe makes about 3 1/2 cups of ricotta.

I had found a recipe online and we tried it last week but since it said to use whole milk and heavy cream, it was a bit heavy for our taste. This week we left out the cream and it turned out much better! In the future we plan to try lower fat milk and see if that works as well.

Step 1: Heat the milk to 185 degrees over medium heat. A deep frying/candy thermometer works for this. Be sure that you don't let the milk boil.

Step 2: Remove the milk from the heat, add the white vinegar and stir for 30 seconds. The milk will coagulate immediately.

Step 3: Add the Kosher salt and stir for another 30 seconds. You can taste it and add more salt if you prefer.

Step 4: Cover the milk with a clean towel (not terry) or a cloth napkin and allow it to sit for 2 hours.

Step 5: Line a strainer with several thicknesses of the cheesecloth and pour the ricotta into it. Allow it to drain for 30 minutes. Serve immediately or chill!

The Brewzzi experience

We have always loved Brewzzi. The service at this restaurant is excellent and the food is great. We eat out a lot and service is always very important to us. It seems like it should be so easy for the wait staff to be alert as to what the customers want but it is rare to find a restaurant that makes service a priority. We have also found that it is obvious when they do make service a priority as every member of the wait staff are great at it. This is one where they care about their customers. We have never had a bad meal or bad service here. Tonight was no exception. We sat at the bar where we could see the kitchen action. To the right in front of us was the 'pizza guy' and a brick pizza oven. To the left were the grills, stoves and ovens. The pizza guy worked non stop all evening and turned out about 15 pizzas while we sat there. A special pizza tonight was Thai Chicken. Several orders of eggplant parmisan were cooked on the left as well as sandwiches, dips and many other meals. Somewhere down the line they cooked the burgers but we didn't see that.

We ordered burgers, I had a Swiss cheese and mushroom burger with smashed red bliss potatoes and Carol had the barbecue burger with cottage chips (potato chips made in house). Excellent as usual.

While we watched the chefs work, we were amazed at the amount of aluminum pie pans they went through and the amount of well used, oddly shaped frying pans that they used. This seems to be the norm at restaurant kitchens as every time we get to watch we see the same practices.

We took the 'opportinity' to eat out tonight as we lost power in our house early this morning and did not get it back until almost 9:00 PM. Brewzzi's was a nice, warm, break from a cold dark house.