By team member, Annie Rivers.
Tiramisu, the Italian dish made of lady fingers, coffee, and sweetened mascarpone cheese, is probably my favorite dessert. I love the creamy sweetness of the cheese meeting the bitterness of the coffee, and the squidge of the soaked lady fingers.
Getting my tiramisu fix is not a problem. It’s one of the easier desserts to make at home. The problem, however, is that mascarpone cheese, one of the primary ingredients, can sometimes be hard to find, and when it can be found, it is often expensive.
Luckily, I’ve discovered that making your own mascarpone cheese is not at all difficult, and not at all expensive. Much like homemade ricotta or cottage cheese, it is simply a matter of a dairy product (in this case heavy cream), an acid, heat, and time.
Once you’ve made this delightfully creamy and soft cheese, you can use it in applications beyond tiramisu. It’s traditional in cannoli, can be used instead of ricotta or cottage cheese in lasagna, and honestly, is delicious in one of its simplest forms, eaten together with fresh fruit and a little honey.
This recipe is lightly adapted from Vegetarian Ventures on Food52.
Ingredients
- 2 cups heavy cream
- 1 tablespoon lemon juice
Directions
- In a saucepan, bring the heavy cream to a low simmer. If you have a thermometer on hand, the target temperature for the cream is 180°F. Allow the cream to simmer for 3 minutes.
- Add the lemon juice and simmer for another 3 minutes.
- Remove the saucepan from the heat, and let the cream-lemon juice mixture come to room temperature, which should take about 30 minutes.
- Line a fine-mesh strainer with a few layers of cheesecloth. (If you do not have cheesecloth, you can use a clean cloth diaper or even paper coffee filters layered on top of one another.) Place a bowl beneath the strainer.
- Pour the cream mixture into the strainer and place the entire strainer-and-bowl setup into the refrigerator overnight. In the morning, you will find a beautiful, creamy, soft cheese waiting for you.
- Enjoy!
Have you ever made homemade mascarpone before? Now that you see how easy it is, are you willing to try? How would you use this mascarpone?
