Homemade ricotta is far better in taste and texture than anything you'll find at the grocery store.
The Fiat 500 had been on the road for about two hours, first grinding through the frenetic Neapolitan traffic to the city limits, then cutting northeast on the highway toward the Matese Mountains, which mark the divide between the regions of Campania and Molise. Crossing over into Molise, the car turned onto smaller mountain roads, winding this way and that on an unhurried approach to the medieval, hilltop town of Castropignano.
Hearing this, I pushed myself taller in the saddle, cocked my head to the side, and squinted my eyes in what I hoped looked like the wistful yet attentive gaze of a man who'd spent his life ushering sheep through the mountains. I tried not to laugh.
While some casein stays behind in the whey after cheesemaking, what's mostly left are the whey proteins. When you reheat the whey, those whey proteins finally coagulate into their own fluffy little curds, and ricotta is born. That's right—real ricotta is made of an entirely different kind of milk protein from cheese and has less dairy fat than cheese.*
In some parts of the world, that would be the end of it. If the pigs were lucky, they'd slurp up the buckets of whey. But these farmers still had the incredibly delicate effort of making ricotta ahead. Many ricotta producers add an acid, like lactic or citric acid, to the whey, since it helps the milk proteins form a more stable curd.
The good news is that when it's done well, the results can come quite close in flavor and texture to true ricotta, and can far surpass the garbage often sold under the name.
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