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Recipe: Homemade Ricotta with Delicata Squash
Speaker: Chef Alec Lipschutz
"Hey everybody, it's Chef Alec. We are back in the Aramark kitchen. Thanksgiving is right around the corner, and if you're struggling to come up with something to bring to your holiday, we got you covered. We're going to teach you how to make a delicious roasted delicata squash on top of homemade ricotta cheese. Now, a lot of you might think that making your own cheese is super difficult, but homemade ricotta is as simple as it could be, and it beats store-brand ricotta 10 out of 10.
So we're going to start with our delicata squash. All we did was slice it into little half-moons and tossed it in some herb oil. The herb oil is super simple—it's just nice olive oil with rosemary, sage, and thyme. Tossed it all together and put it in a 400° oven for about 10 minutes until golden brown.
All righty, now is the fun part: we're going to make ricotta cheese. In our pot, we have 8 cups of milk, 4 cups of cream, and just a pinch of salt. We've been bringing that up to a simmer. It's just at a very gentle rolling boil right now.
So what we're going to do here is kill the heat and add 6 tablespoons of white wine vinegar. We're just going to give that a little stir, and what's going to happen here is the curds are going to start to separate from the whey. That'll take about 3 minutes, and you'll see it clearly separating into a thick white part on top and kind of a creamier liquid on the bottom.
All right, it's been about 4 or 5 minutes, our curds have separated from our whey. So now we're going to take a strainer with some cheesecloth on top—it's just sitting over a bowl—and we're going to strain it.
We're going to let that drain for about 45 minutes to an hour until it's nice and dry, and when it is, you are going to have the best ricotta you ever had.
Now that we have our beautiful homemade ricotta, we're just going to take a nice generous amount, put it right in the center of the plate, and kind of smush it around just a little bit.
Now, our roasted delicata squash, we're just going to take it and nice and rustically put it right on top. We're going to add some candied pumpkin seeds to go with that squash, and now we're going to finish it with a drizzle of that herb oil that we roasted the squash in.
Here's our finished product. Just look at how good that looks! For this holiday, I'm thankful for a lot of things, but especially our viewers. Have a great holiday everyone, enjoy!"
