These days, ricotta is also made in central and southern Europe and in North America, especially Wisconsin, New York, Ontario, and Quebec. Italian brands are still made from 100 percent whey. Disinclined to waste perfectly good food, the Italians turned that leftover whey into ricotta.
Pressed and ripened, the curd becomes hard 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. Italian by birth, ricotta is a traditional whey 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. Yet, lower in fat though they are, both these cheeses are rich and delicious enough for the most dedicated caseophile. On the average, Americans consume only two-thirds of a pound of ricotta each year, and yogurt cheese is even more of a novelty. (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.Īnd we can learn to love some leaner, lesser known cheeses - for example, part-skim ricotta cheese and yogurt cheese. There’s always evasive action - cutting fat from other parts of our diet. 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? And cheese is a fine food - flavorful, versatile and affordable, a good source of protein, calcium, riboflavin and vitamin A. In fact, we’ve almost doubled our consumption in the last 15 years, up to an average of 26 pounds per person per year. Yet who wants to give up cheese? Americans love it. All are prime candidates for the nutritional hit list. Colby and Monterey also weigh in at nine grams of fat per ounce, Gouda and Edam at eight. At nine calories per gram, this venerable English cheese gets 72 percent of its calories from fat.
An ounce of Cheddar has 113 calories and nine grams of fat. You realize, of course, what the Surgeon General is meddling with. “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 HealthĭAMN. Ricotta cheese and yogurt cheese are deliciously soft and creamy.
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