Ricotta and Whey

To satisfy a request for my Ricotta recipe, which is very simple, you will find it below. It is possible to make this with the barest of equipment and ingredients, but it is useful to have a thermometre to measure the temperature of the milk. It is necessary to heat the milk to just below boiling, and as we know when milk boils it tends to emigrate from the pot with dramatic effects. In Japan, ricotta is expensive, and buttermilk or whey literally unavailable most where; so for the price of two litres of milk, lemons and energy use it is possible to get 500 grams of ricotta and whey for baking.

4 litres of pasteurised, not UHT, milk
Juice of 2 lemons

Heat the milk till it reaches about 90 - 93 degrees centigrade. Then add the lemon juice and return the temperature to 93 degrees. Switch off the heat, and let the milk curdle for a little while, it should have done that already.
Scald a cloth (linen, or an old white towel - they must be clean as can be) a small sieve, and a large sieve and a large bowl. invert the small siive inside the bowl, rest the larger sieve on the top. Line the large sieve with the cloth, then pour the curdled milk into the cloth. Leave this to drip for about two hours, in a coolish place. Scrape the cheese into a container, and pour the whey into the milk cartons from where the milk came. (The whey can be frozen, and it can be used as buttermilk for baking cakes, muffins, etc.)

The whey can also be sprayed onto aphids, to eradicate them from your plants as they do not like the lactic acid content. Repeating the spraying every 3 days or so for a couple of weeks to eliminate the aphids emerging from eggs laid on the plants; they have a 10 day cycle from laying to hatching.)