What a great way to spend a Saturday afternoon!!Learning how to make fresh Ricotta with Chef Maria Capdevielle at Kitchen on Fire North. Maria started cooking in Italy as a child by watching and helping her mother and has long continued the tradition. Maria has a cookbook called "My Sweet Abruzzo", and is in the process of writing her second cookbook about Baking with Olive Oil.
First and foremost I just want to tell you how easy it is to make fresh Ricotta! I was amazed that everyone in the class was able to follow along and be able to produce fresh cheese by the end of class. The recipe's we made all corresponded to each other in a good way and made sense. Maria had a well thought out plan and it was executed quite nicely during the course of the class.
Step 1 was making Fresh handmade Ricotta:
This process was very simple the most important ingredient was getting raw milk which I realized is pretty much in every local supermarket. 1 and a half gallons of milk makes about 1.5 to 2 cups of ricotta.
Next we made some fresh crostini topped with ricotta, fresh herbs, and sun dried tomatoes.
The next receipe was for our main dish which was the exquisite gnocchi di ricotta with butter, sage and walnut sauce. You could substitute pecan's or hazelnuts to the receipe instead of walnuts. If you have a nuts allergy you could substitute breadcrumbs to the sauce.
The dish that ended our day was the Torta di Ricotta Romana. This cake was made with ricotta, lemon and orange zest. It was light and refreshing, the perfect compliment after eating the gnocchi.
We made the cake into smaller muffin sized desserts in order to be able to eat them by the end of class normally we would make the batter into a small cake.
Also we finished them off with powdered sugar. Mangia!
You can find out more about Maria and sign up for one of her upcoming classes by checking out her blog site: www.mariateresaskitchen.com. I highly reccommend this class coming up at KOF with Maria: https://kitchenonfire.com/classes/view/id/2195/
Buon appetito!
Maria gave us a a tip on some really good olive oil that is made locally called California Olive Ranch. Happy cooking!! If you are interested in any of the recipe's feel free to contact me.
This looks awesome. Can't wait for some more of the Torta di Ricotta Romana!
Posted by: Pedro | 11/05/2012 at 04:56 PM