Friday, March 16, 2007

Tiramisu

So many people have asked me for the recipe for Tiramisu and I realized in fact that I had posted here specifically only about a modification of mine to the traditional recipe (see here for summertime strawberry tiramisu). So I decided it's time to fix this terrible lack.

(Almost) Traditional Tiramisu
Ingredients
1 lb soft ricotta cheese (N.B. this is my light version of Tiramisu. In the original version, this is mascarpone, and not ricotta. A lot of people I know seem to prefer my light version, also because it's more fluffy than with mascarpone - and, last but not least, mascarpone costs like gold in the US, for some weird reason).
15 ladyfinger cookies
2 eggs
~1/2 cup sugar (or more if you like sweet desserts)
2 espresso coffees diluted with ~1 cup water (or ~1 cup american coffee) - cold or warm, not hot
2 tbsp rum
unsweetened cocoa powder
Procedure
With a hand mixer, beat the egg yolks with the sugar. Add the ricotta cheese in it, mixing by hand. In another bowl, whip egg whites with a dash of salt in them, till firm. Mix the eggwhites to the other mixture. Mix the coffee and the rum. One at a time, quickly soak half of the ladyfinger cookies in the coffee/rum mixture, and place them on the bottom of the serving bowl. Add half of the cream on top of them, and repeat these two layers once more. Put in the fridge and leave there for at least two hours (usually I prepare the dessert the night before). Sprinkle the top with cocoa powder before serving.

6 comments:

Susan in Italy said...

Hey, I've never tried ricotta in tiramisù, sounds like a good idea.

My alternate recipe (especially when I'm in the States where, you're right, mascarpone is astromically priced) is to use cream cheese (spalmabile) which has a similar texture to mascarpone but is salty. I like the addition of salt to the sweetness of everything else.

chemcookit said...

Hey Susan
I thought about cream cheese, but isn't it a bit too 'dense'? Do you dilute it with something?
Once I did half ricotta and half cottage cheese. That was also good and it did add a little bit of saltiness, if you like that.

Susan in Italy said...

Actually I think you're right; if you were to use only cream cheese, you'd have something too thick. I actually make a merengue with 3 egg whites, and mix the raw yolks into the cream cheese, then fold the merengue into that. It makes it lighter. Do you beat the cottage cheese until you get the lumps out?

chemcookit said...

oh, how nice! I may try one like that next time.

As for my cottage cheese experiment: nope, I didn't do anything to it. It was a brand that had very small curd grains, though. It may have been more like 2/3 ricotta and 1/3 cottage cheese (it was once when I wanted to make a lot of it and I didn't have enough ricotta).

... said...

Hi Marta!
I've been looking around your receipes and I'll try the Tiramisu for sure.
See you in the lab soon!! ;)

chemcookit said...

Hey Albert!
Thanks for stopping by! And good luck with the tiramisu and the lab work. :)