What We’re Cooking This Week: Mexican-Style Ricotta With Salsa

Mixing curd cheese with salsa hardly deserves to be called a recipe, but it’s a quick and tasty dip to pair with your favorite tortilla chips.

Mexican-Style Ricotta With Salsa Photo by Jim Dixon.

Jim Dixon wrote about food for WW for more than 20 years, but these days most of his time is spent at his olive oil-focused specialty food business Wellspent Market. Jim’s always loved to eat, and he encourages his customers to cook by sending them recipes every week through his newsletter. We’re happy to have him back creating some special dishes just for WW readers.

Before the cheese nerds object, let me make one thing clear: Mexican-style ricotta, requesón in Spanish, is not really ricotta. True ricotta (the word comes from the Latin term for “recooked”) is made from the liquidy whey byproduct from the mozzarella production process. What we call ricotta is curd cheese, the result of using acid and heat to separate milk into whey and, well, curds.

Every dairy-eating culture makes some kind of fresh curd cheese, from paneer in India to northern European quark to the various fetas made around the Mediterranean. With a bit more work they can become stretched curd cheeses like mozzarella, and with time those curds make what the long-forgotten essayist, critic, anthologist and editor Clifton Fadiman called “milk’s leap toward immortality.”

But those are cheeses for another day. Requesón, like all of the fresh curd cheeses, is of the moment. Soft and spreadable, a bit drier than the fake ricotta in the tub, it’s meant to be eaten soon after it’s made. In Mexico it’s typically stuffed into the little fried rolled tortillas called taquitos, but it’s also used for chile rellenos and even added to guacamole.

Diana Kennedy, the famously irascible Brit turned Mexican food maven, scrambled requesón with onion, chile and tomato for tacos. Rancho Gordo’s Steve Sando learned to fry it with chiles, onions and epazote in the central Mexican state of Hidalgo as a topping for a bowl of beans.

In the northern Spanish province of Asturias, aka el país de los quesos (the land of cheeses), the locals love requesón drizzled with honey for dessert. The curd cheese also finds its way onto grilled bread with roasted red peppers. Versatile requesón can go anywhere you’d take ricotta.

Oregon’s home to one of the country’s best producers of Mexican-style cheeses, Don Froylan. The Ochoa family makes a variety of cheeses from Willamette Valley milk in Salem, and while most supermarkets sell their queso fresco, cotija and Oaxaca cheeses, it takes a little effort to find requesón. Along with a couple of other special cheeses, like the melty botanero flavored with cilantro and jalapeño or the soft asadero with habaneros, requesón seems reserved for the smaller grocery stores that serve our Spanish-speaking population. If you can’t get to one of them, substitute ricotta.

My favorite use for requesón is as a dip or spread like this. Mixing curd cheese with salsa hardly deserves to be called a recipe, but it’s quick and a tasty alternative to just plain salsa for your favorite tortilla chips. I’ve also stirred spicy green sauce into requesón, and the template could be extended to lots of other things.

Mexican-Style Ricotta With Salsa

1 pound package of requesón, preferably Don Froylan

1-2 cups of your favorite salsa

Combine the requesón and salsa, mix thoroughly, and serve with chips.

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