Ricotta is a soft unripened cheese easily made at home. Ricotta is Italian, but very similar cheeses are made all over Europe.
It was called tvorog when my mom made it. Farmers cheese is very similar, just dryer and firmer. Cottage cheese is not so different, either. It can be added to salads and pies, eaten alone or with marmalade, honey or grated chocolate as a dessert. Homemade ricotta recipe follows.
To make ricotta, I either culture milk or mix fresh milk with already cultured like buttermilk, kefir or yogurt. It depends on what I have in my fridge and how much. I use organic milk. To culture milk, add a tablespoon of live yogurt, sour cream, or kefir as a starter to a gallon of milk and leave it at room temperature overnight or longer. Note that bacterial growth is exponential: milk may turn from slightly sour to full-ripened cloudy cultured in last hour of cultivation. I usually use gallon plastic milk jigs: I open the milk, use a cup or two of it, add the starter to the rest and shake well. One gallon of milk makes about one and a half pounds, or three cups, of relatively dry ricotta. It turns out about $4/lb (May 2007) if organic milk used.
Unpasteurized milk needs starter as well. If you let it ferment on its own, you cannot very well predict which bacteria will grow better. Sometimes it turns into great homemade cheese and sometimes it's just badly spoiled milk. If you keep fermenting milk at home, your kitchen becomes "seasoned" with the right bacteria flying around, and you will be more likely to get good fermented milk on its own.
Otherwise, just mix two to four parts of fresh milk with one part of fermented milk in a large pot and proceed. Or, add 1/4 cup of pure white vinegar to fresh milk, mix well and let it rest for fifteen minutes.
Once milk turned thick and/or curdly, I cut off the top of the jig and place it in a pot of water on medium heat. If you fermented or mixed milk in another pot, still double-boil, because milk tends to burn next to the heat source and you try to avoid stirring. The water in the pot may boil, but milk should not. Watch the milk as it warms up and starts to separate into curd and whey.
Take four-folded cheesecloth and place it on a large strainer. Slowly pour warm separated milk in the cheesecloth. Discard the jig. Bring the corners of cheesecloth together, lift the cheesecloth with curd and hung it over the sink or pot for an hour or longer. If you want firmer, drier cheese, you can press the curd in the cheesecloth between two cutting boards to remove the remaining whey. You may want to collect the whey for pancakes or bread.
See also: kitchen, homemade bread.