Making home made Racotta cheese and Italian sausage for your Lasagna (paprika, homemade)

[Rcm58]

I'm making up a few pans of lasagna tonight, I'm letting the Ricotta cheese I made earlier cool for a bit before I strain it off and in a few minutes I'll grind up two small boston butts and make sweet italian sausage. I made the meatballs last night. I am out of rennet to make fresh mozzarella so I bought the whole milk mozzarella this time.

Ricotta can be made simply or you can play with the recipe.

Heat up a gallon of whole milk in a heavy bottom pan or double boiler slowly while stirring the bottom and sides of pot until it reaches 180 degrees, add 1 1/2 tablespoons sea salt and 1 1/2 tablespoons sugar and stir slowly, now add 1/4 cup of lemon juice to the pot and you will see it instantly curd. let simmer without stirring an additional 20 minutes and remove from heat. Let cool completely then strain through a cheesecloth lined strainer. This will make around 16 oz but you can increase the yield and improve taste by adding buttermilk and half n half or heavy cream to the whole milk.

The Sweet Italian sausage is easy too.

10 Lbs boston butt after removing bone
2 oz salt
1 oz black pepper
1 oz fennel seed

Cube pork and grind through a course plate twice before mixing in seasoning, if the mix is to dry you can add a small amount of water and mix throughly by hand. to make this mixture into hot italian sausage just add 1/2 oz red pepper flakes and 1 oz paprika.

[kelsie]

rcm, thanks for the great tips.

[mommytotwo]

Wow, a whole gallon of milk which weighs 8 lbs only makes 1 lb of ricotta?!?! and after only 20 min of boiling.

How does it lose so much weight?

I might try to make it sometimes.

It's good to know how to make stuff like that. I love homemade yogurt, which uses a similar method minus the lemon.

interesting, thanks.

[Naptowner]

When you strain it you remove most of the water.