The Italian Voice

You already know that I am going to move to low Piedmont, but you do not know yet that my boyfriend’s parents are from Catania, in Sicily, living in low Piedmont.
Everytime I visit them, I learn something about that wonderful island of the Southern Italy.
Today I want to write about the ricotta cheese.

In Italy, we have different regions which produce that fantastic versatile cheese, but I think Sicily has a real primacy for its taste and value.
Sicily uses the ricotta for several typical dishes, especially for pastries and desserts; you can easily remember the heavenly taste of the cannoli siciliani, which are cylinder-shaped pastries stuffed with ricotta, chocolate drops and sometimes also patties (candies).

In my region, which is the Emilia-Romagna in Northern Italy (where the capital of province, Bologna, is situated just between Milan and Florence), people use the ricotta cheese, but especially to eat it as normal cheese, maybe together the second course; its use is connected mainly to its salty flavour.

Well, my future parents-in-law teached me to eat ricotta during the meal, tasting it together with sugar.
So what do you understand? Yes, that you can eat pasta which is salty and immediately after a sugared cheese and maybe just after them even another salty dish!!
This mix can sound a bit odd, but I guarantee that an attempt is surely worth the while.

Just to explain better what I mean, here is my suggestion of what you have to do with your ricotta cheese:

usual shape of the ricotta cheese

First of all see that you buy a shape of ricotta made by sheep (avoid any other kind of cheese, such as the one from cow or mixed types, because its taste is the best one).
Then simply put it into a bowl or a dish, add some spoons of powdered sugar (avoid any other one, so that the sugar can be totally absorbed by ricotta) and mix it for some minutes with a spoon.
All you have to do now is enjoy your dish!

To me, this seems to be originally a poor dish, which could be prepared in the past as meal by poor families because they had sheeps and beets for sugar and just because it is quick and easy to serve; in addition, it offers immediate energy given by the cheese together with the sugar.

The unique expedient to remember is to eat just a few spoons of ricotta, because its calorific value is quite high: 170 calories for 100 grams of ricotta (produced by sheep, so simply made with serum and not with the add of milk and cream)!

Anyway, I thought to hand down this nice “recipe” to the ones who are interested in typical Italian dishes because I imagined that you will be happy to discover, like I did, this Southern Italian habit to add sugar to the ricotta cheese everytime, even if it is tasted during normal meals. I hope you will enjoy it.

And if you want to try other great recipes with Italian foods, you can visit GaidaR’s blog (for example, her latest entry reports a fantastic recipe of “mushroom tortellini bake recipe“), you will not be disappointed! She is a new dear friend from Sydney, I met her on BlogCatalog and she is going to cooperate with HerProBlog as blogger.