Cheese, Ricotta Salata

⚠ UNTESTED. A briefing.

⭐ This is not really a different cheese. It is an answer to a problem, and the problem is that fresh whey ricotta keeps for about three days and you have just made more than you can eat.

Press it, salt it, and age it a couple of months, and you get a firm, white, milky-salty cheese that slices and grates and keeps for months. Salt and pressure, applied to something you already have.

🔴 Which makes it the most useful recipe on this page for most people, because it is the one that turns a small awkward yield into something you can plan around. The second-run cheeses are all tiny; ricotta salata is how three tiny batches become one worth having.

Ingredients

• 2 to 3 lb fresh whey ricotta, drained firm — see Traditional Whey Ricotta
• Coarse non-iodised salt — roughly 3% of the drained weight, plus more for the surface
• Butter muslin, and a mould or a colander that will take a weight

Directions

Key ingredients

Salt

1. Drain the ricotta hard first. Hang it in butter muslin for 4 to 6 hours, or overnight in the fridge, until it stops dripping.
2. Mix salt through it at about 3% of its weight, breaking the curd up with your hands and working the salt evenly through. ⚠ Evenly matters more than the exact percentage — a pocket of unsalted curd in the middle is where a problem starts.
3. Pack it into a cloth-lined mould and press it. Start light — 2 to 3 PSI for an hour — then flip, redress and go to ~8 PSI overnight. ⚠ Do not press it like a hard cheese. This curd has no rennet network in it and it will simply extrude through the cloth.
4. Turn it out, and salt the surface. Rub coarse salt over the whole outside.
5. Air-dry 2 to 3 days on a mat, turning daily, until the surface is dry to the touch.
6. Age at 50-55 F / 10-13 C, 80-85% RH, for 2 to 3 months, turning a couple of times a week and re-salting the surface lightly in the first fortnight. ⚠ Wipe off any mould with a cloth wrung out in brine — on a rindless white cheese it shows immediately and is easy to stay ahead of.
7. What right looks like: firm, sliceable, brilliant white, and salty and milky rather than sharp. It should crumble cleanly and grate without gumming.

Notes

Where this recipe came from — and what it is not 🔴 UNTESTED. ⚠ And note what it starts from: genuine whey ricotta, not the whole-milk kind. Whole-milk ricotta will press and salt perfectly well and give you a pleasant fresh salted cheese, but it is a different starting material and it belongs with the fresh cheeses.

⭐ Why this is the practical answer to the whole page Everything else in this family suffers from the same arithmetic: a gallon of whey gives you three to six ounces, and that is the honest yield. Three separate makes of that size are three awkward little bowls that all go off within the week. Combined, salted and pressed, they are one round that keeps for months — and this is the standard, obvious, traditional thing to do about it. ⭐ It is worth planning for before you start, rather than discovering on day four.

⚠ Where it sits against the other dried whey cheeses A dried mizithra or a dried anari reach a similar place by a similar route — salt, air and time — and the three are reasonable substitutes for one another. Ricotta salata is the mildest and the wettest of them, because it is pressed and aged rather than genuinely dried out, and it is the one to reach for when you want the salt without the sharpness.

Read alongside /cheese/makes/whey-and-second-run/ on the site.