Rachel Roddy's recipe for Sicilian salted ricotta and tomato salad | A Kitchen in Rome

Whey is teased by artful Sicilian hands into traditional salted ricotta, never better than when enjoyed in this simple tomato salad

Lorena is lifting ricotta from the 150-litre pan in the corner of the room into small, perforated tubs. It’s 10am. She has been at the caseificio (dairy) since just after 5am, along with her nephew, Aurelio. It is July and a combination of dog-day Sicilian heat and lambing means there’s less milk. Today there was just shy of 100 litres, from sheep kept by Lorena’s husband a few miles outside the city. Most of the work has already been done; the milk has been heated with salt and rennet and, thanks to the alchemy of coagulation, separated into curds and whey. The curds have been cut and pressed into forms, at which point they are called tuma. The remaining whey in the huge pan will be used to cook the forms of tuma for a few hours, after which they will be called primo sale (first salt), until they are old enough to be pecorino Siciliano.

I arrive to see what Lorena, once a hospital lab technician but now reborn as a cheesemaker, refers to as the guadagno pulito – her clean earnings, the something-for-nothing – the ricotta. If you’ve ever seen whey, you will probably agree that it is pretty unpromising, yellow and thin. However, it has more to give. Before the tuma is cooked, more milk and rennet are added to the whey, and it is recooked or reheated, and soft white clots, given the same name as the process, ricotta, come to the surface. From seemingly nothing, to something so wobbly and good, which seems a miraculous thing.

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