Ricotta Pie Recipe, or Pizza Dolce

As I was preparing my round-up of recipes for the holidays, I realized I have very few dessert recipes. That makes sense, since I don’t usually make dessert. I’m usually equally tempted by finishing off with a cheese plate instead of something from the baker at a restaurant.

This recipe provides both – cheese and a sweet treat. It is an Italian recipe called Ricotta Pie, also known as Pizza Dolce or Italian Sweet Pie. It uses ricotta mixed with sugar and eggs. It is very similar to cheesecake, but lighter. You can make the cake a little less sweet by adding the sugar a bit at a time, or also make it less eggy/more custardy if you reduce the amount of egg used.

You can serve the pie simply as is. Add a little eye pleasing detail when serving with a little dusting of powdered sugar. Or, you can add fruit – either in the mixture or you can do so on top (be it in a warmed jam form or a sauce). You could also choose to a handful of mini chocolate chips inside the mixture into the pie. You can go more savory by adding spinach, or topping the pie with tomatoes… You can use lemon flavor via lemon juice and rind, but you could just as easily have used orange flavor instead, or amaretto, or more cinnamon… and/or you can drizzle chocolate on top.

I’ve seen this pie with an actual pastry pie crust, and also seen it with a graham cracker crust. I made this for a party so for ease of serving, made it in a 13 x 9 inch glass baking dish instead of pie pans and omitted any crust at all.

There are a lot of possibilities! The version I decided to make includes whiskey, orange zest, and then topped with chocolate to finish for a Whiskey and Orange Flavored Ricotta Cheese Cake with Chocolate.

You can make the pie the day before the refrigerate it to then serve the next day, which makes it wonderful for the holiday season to get some things out of the way to free up your kitchen.

Ingredients:

• 3 pounds of  ricotta (48 ounces)- you might find the best value is to purchase two 32 ounce containers of ricotta you purchase where you will use 1 1/2 of them. The other half you can enjoy spread on bread, or make some stuffed pasta shells!
• 1 1/4 cup of sugar or to taste – I only used 1 cup so it wasn’t too sweet for my palate, but I’ve seen some variations that use up to 2 cups!
• 4 eggs. Some recipes use up to 12 eggs, so you can decide how eggy you want this.
• 1 1/2 shots of whiskey or to taste
• Zest of one orange
• 1/2 of a bar of chocolate (optional)

Directions:

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. As it is heating up, combine all ingredients in large bowl and mix well until the filling is creamy. You can do this using a mixer or hand mixer or your own awesome muscles.
2. Pour into a greased 9 x 13 inch pan or two 10 inch pie rounds. Obviously if you wanted to use a dough first, you would have already prepared and put this down…
   
3. Bake everything at 350 degrees F for 1 hour or so – start checking 1 hour to see when the top is golden and an inserted toothpick comes out clean. Because this was such a big pan, I think I ended up with 1 hour 30 minutes.
   
4. Before serving, let cool. If you’d like you can refrigerate this to serve the next day, which will help the cake set a little firmer. For my topping, I waited until the cake cooled a little bit but was still warm and then grated an initial layer of chocolate that melted.
   
   Then, later, I grated more chocolate on top when it was totally cooled so the shavings stayed intact.
   
   When serving, cut into pie pieces or if using a pan like I did, into squares. You can dust with powdered sugar, or any of the various toppings I mentioned.

As I mentioned, I like how the ricotta makes this a lighter cheesecake, and that you can have so much potential for toppings, or you can add more (such as fruit or a handful of chocolate chips) into your ricotta batter into the cake itself. How do you think you would make this ricotta cake?