ricotta

Lemon Ricotta Pancakes

August 9, 2017

Remember when I made homemade ricotta cheese a couple weeks ago? Well, as soon as I made it I knew what I wanted to do with it: make lemon ricotta pancakes!

If you have never had lemon ricotta pancakes (or any ricotta-based pancake) you are missing out! It is not your average pancake. Instead of being light and fluffy, it’s a bit more dense and creamy. It’s almost like if a cheesecake and a pancake had a baby. Almost.

Just trust me on this guys, it’s good.

I adapted the Kitchn’s ricotta pancakes to make my lemon version, and they turned out fantastic! I am slightly ashamed to admit that I ate the entire stack of pancakes myself. But only slightly. If you had tasted them, you would understand.

Start by mixing together your dry ingredients – flour, baking soda, salt, and sugar – and your wet ingredients – ricotta, lemon juice, lemon zest, milk, and egg yolks. Keep the egg whites separate.

Then mix the flour into the wet ingredient, stirring only until the flour is barely incorporated. Meanwhile, whip the egg whites until they are nice and fluffy. This will help make your pancakes nice and light and fluffy to counter act the dense ricotta. Then fold the egg whites into the rest of the batter.

While you are mixing up the batter you can heat your griddle to medium heat. I love using my griddle/panini press gadget because I can set my temperature to 300-350 degrees, which is the perfect temp for perfect pancakes.

Use any sort of spoon or cup to spoon about a quarter cup of batter onto the griddle. An ice cream scoop also works perfectly. Cook until tiny bubbles form on the top of the pancake and the sides look a bit dry. Then flip!

After another 2 or so minutes, they are ready to be stacked up!

Instead of maple syrup, I made a quick and easy lemon glaze to pour on top of these bad boys. It was just lemon juice, lemon zest, milk, and confectioners sugar. It was the perfect addition to these lemon ricotta pancakes!

Now do you blame me for eating the whole stack?

I didn’t think so!

Peach Ricotta Pancakes

August 22, 2014

No matter how old I get, pancakes will still be my favorite breakfast food. They are simple and sweet and remind me of Saturday mornings watching cartoons as a kid. Even though there is nothing wrong with plain, unadulterated pancakes, they might be my favorite breakfast food to experiment with. A great foundation to add whatever sorts of flavors I like. And being that it is summer and peaches are in full supply here in the South, it seemed like an obvious choice to me!

This also seemed like the perfect opportunity to try out a ricotta pancake recipe. A ricotta pancake batter is very similar to normal batter, except that part of the milk is replaced with ricotta cheese, making the resulting pancakes very creamy. Once the batter was mixed, I folded diced peaches directly into the it.

I poured about 1/4-1/3 cup of batter onto a griddle heated up to 375 degrees. Once the pancakes formed bubbles on top, I flipped them over to cook the other side. Each side took about 2 minutes.

For me, pancakes aren’t complete without butter and syrup. But syrup just didn’t seem right for these pancakes. So instead, I sprinkled a bit of powdered spiked with nutmeg and cinnamon over the top.

The powdered sugar adds the sweetness that you would get from the syrup and the cinnamon and nutmeg are the perfect compliment to the peaches.

The pancakes themselves are creamier than normal pancakes, thanks to the ricotta. But they are still supper fluffy! With the peaches mixed directly into the batter, it ensures that there is a little piece of peach in each bite.

What is your favorite pancake flavor? Or do you prefer the basics?

[yumprint-recipe id=’39’]

Grilled Peach and Prosciutto Pizza

July 23, 2014

There are a few things to me that are quintessential to summer. 2 of them are grilling out and peaches.

To kick off my “summer vacation” (the week off I had between jobs), my husband combined those two things with our favorite Friday meal, pizza, to create the grilled peach and prosciutto pizza.

I have to admit, we had never grilled pizza before. So what follows are some guidelines that we should have followed, not exactly what we did do.

We started with some gorgeous and juicy peaches from the previous weekends farmers market haul, prosciutto, mozzarella, basil, and ricotta. I would also highly recommend mixing in some garlic into the ricotta and drizzling balsamic on top. While the pizza was delicious, those two things would have added some more depth of flavor.

The first thing we did was grilled off the pizza dough. We placed the dough right on the grill over in direct heat. What we should have done was heat up the grill with the cover down until the thermometer read 400 degrees. While the grill is heating up, you can prep the dough and all the other ingredients, then once its hot toss the dough on there and cook on each side for a few minutes.

Once the dough was a bit crispy and more crust like, I removed them from the grill and started layering on the ingredients, starting with the ricotta, the prosciutto, peaches, cheese, and then the basil.

We put the pizzas back on the grill over indirect heat and closed the top to let them cook for another couple minutes until the cheese got nice and bubbly.

Grilling pizza really isn’t all too different from cooking them in the oven. I really enjoyed the extra flavor that we got from the direct fire. There is something about that charred flavor from the grilling and the sweetness from the peaches that make this the perfect summer meal.

Do you grill pizzas? What are some of your favorite flavors?

[yumprint-recipe id=’2′]