Harold McGee

2002 | No. 62

Ricotta in the Monti Sicani of Sicily
The Delicate Cheese as It Used to be Made

By Harold McGee


Giovanni Cacciatore was heating a pot of whey for ricotta near the remote town of Santo Stefano Quisquina in the Sicani Mountains, a twisting 90-kilometer drive south of Palermo. Morning sunlight came through a large, open doorway. Just outside it were 500 sheep, 50 goats, and a trail leading to mountain pastures that in April, when this photo was taken, were still green from winter rains, not yet parched. That was in 1997.

For thousands of years, ricotta was made in settings like this. No longer. The Cacciatores were told they couldn’t continue. European regulations were in flux, but the effect, at the very least, was to discourage a wood fire, a door open to animals, and a room whose surfaces are not easy to sanitize. The Cacciatores, who have herded sheep and made cheese for generations, began to sell their milk to a large cheese producer while they worked to finance and build their own modern caseificio.

Ricotta is the tender cheese that results when the sparse proteins left in the whey after cheesemaking are brought together by the combined action of heat and the whey’s own acidity. Giovanni and his father, Ignazio, had made cheese earlier that morning, curdling the mixed milk of the ewes and goats in a wooden barrel with rennet they had made themselves from lambs’ stomachs. They broke the curd into small pieces, inserted a basket that filled with whey, lifted out the whey with a bucket, and then poured it into the blackened ricotta pot. Giovanni added salt, stoked the fire, and stirred for half an hour with a wooden paddle. When the liquid was nearly hot enough for the protein to coagulate (about 180 degrees F, or 80 degrees C), he added some fresh milk, whose abundant protein helped to start the process. After a few minutes, tiny white stars appeared in the whey, protein particles forming and rising in the heat.

Giovanni knocked the fire down, stirred the pot very gently for a few minutes, and covered it. He raked out the fire and let the stars of protein grow until they formed a continuous gel. Ignazio then carefully scooped out the ricotta with a shallow ladle, using a quick twist of his wrist so as to disrupt the surrounding gel as little as possible. He gently laid the scoopfuls of ricotta in plastic baskets from which the moisture drained. Each basket held perhaps half a dozen scoops that quickly merged into a glassy, barely set white mass. Ignazio put a scoopful into a bowl and passed it to me. The warm spoonfuls seemed to evaporate in my mouth in clouds of gentle sheepiness. Where the simple rubbery curd of the fresh cheese was bland, needing time and salt to develop character, the fresh ricotta was irresistible. The cooking had filled out its flavor, and the fragility, salt, and residual warmth all conspired to help the volatile molecules escape the gel and deliver their aromas.

That was surprising delicacy from leftovers cooked in a fire-blackened pot. And the delicacy was evanescent. As the ricotta cools and drains, it becomes drier, denser, coarser. Only the shepherds and a few visitors to their remote pastures knew traditional ricotta at its freshest. It was one of the good things in a hard life. ●  

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