Ricotta Cheese Recipes and Yogurt Cheese Recipes: Whey to Go

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Ricotta cheese recipes and yogurt cheese recipes are deliciously soft and creamy.

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Not all creamy cheeses are loaded with fat.

The primary priority for dietary change is to reduce intake of total fats. ... At present, dietary fat accounts for about 37 percent of the total energy intake of Americans — well above the recommended upper limit of 30 percent. — The Surgeon General's Report on Nutrition and Health

DAMN. You realize, of course, what the Surgeon General is meddling with. Our fried chicken. Our hamburgers. Our chocolate. Our cheese. Cheese?

You betcha. An ounce of Cheddar has 113 calories and nine grams of fat. At nine calories per gram, this venerable English cheese gets 72 percent of its calories from fat. Colby and Monterey also weigh in at nine grams of fat per ounce, Gouda and Edam at eight. All are prime candidates for the nutritional hit list.

Yet who wants to give up cheese? Americans love it. In fact, we've almost doubled our consumption in the last 15 years, up to an average of 26 pounds per person per year. And cheese is a fine food — flavorful, versatile and affordable, a good source of protein, calcium, riboflavin and vitamin A. How then are we to heed the warnings of the Surgeon General and the USDA and the American Heart Association and the American Cancer Society — all of whom are trumpeting the evils of fat — and still keep cheese on our tables?

There's always evasive action — cutting fat from other parts of our diet. (After all, the issue is total intake, not the percentage in any given food.) We can (shudder) reduce the size of our servings, sprinkling cheese over the top of a casserole rather than mixing it throughout, and never, ever order a pizza with double cheese.

And we can learn to love some leaner, lesser known cheeses — for example, part-skim ricotta and yogurt cheese. On the average, Americans consume only two-thirds of
a pound of ricotta each year, and yogurt cheese is even more of a novelty. Yet, lower in fat though they are, both these cheeses are rich and delicious enough for the most dedicated caseophile.

Part-Skim Ricotta Cheese 

Smooth, white and fluffy, with a mild, slightly sweet taste, ricotta is usually found in the dairy section of the supermarket, packed in one-pound plastic tubs.

Italian by birth, ricotta is a traditional whey cheese. In the production of hard cheeses such as provolone, milk is coagulated with rennet, an enzyme that causes the casein, a milk protein, to clump together and form a solid curd — leaving the sweetish, liquid whey. Pressed and ripened, the curd becomes hard cheese. Disinclined to waste perfectly good food, the Italians turned that leftover whey into ricotta. Italian brands are still made from 100 percent whey.

These days, ricotta is also made in central and southern Europe and in North America, especially Wisconsin, New York, Ontario and Quebec. North American ricotta is made from a mixture of whey and milk, either whole or part-skim. (A few companies use all milk; most experts argue that, by definition, without whey it isn't ricotta but something closer to the Mexican queso blanco.)

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