Roman Moretum
The granddaddy of herb and garlic cheese
Moretum is as old as it is simple. We take a plain cheese (we’re going to use a homemade ricotta) and smash in a bunch of herbs. If you like herb and garlic cream cheese… you’ll love this.
Get that cheese
Firstly we’ll need cheese. You can just buy cheese. We recommend a good ricotta or some other easily malleable cheese. If you have a cheese you think really works here, put it in the comments.
Today though, we’re going with homemade ricotta. It’s easy and fun. They only thing you’ll need that isn’t a standard kitchen staple is some cheese or muslin cloth. If you’re going to buy cheese just skip to the second section.
To make this cheese we’re going to need:
750 ml of whole milk
The juice of one lemon
Cheese cloth
Get 750 ml of whole milk in a pan and gently heat it.
Keep stirring while you warm it, we don’t want to get any burnt milk.
When it begins to bubble, add the juice of one lemon.
Be careful to not let it boil over!
After you’ve added the lemon juice, turn off the heat but keep it warm. Stir it for about five minutes and let it sit for another five. In the end it should look like this.
If you’re adding salt, this would be the moment to do it.
Drain this through the cheese cloth.
Give it a squeeze and let it cool down. Don’t drain it too much, we want a bit of whey left in here.
That’s it for our cheese, now lets make our herb mix.
Herby herbs
So we’re going to get some herbs and leaves. And when we say some… we mean a lot. We’ll get to which herbs in a bit.
Apart from that we’ll also need a mortar and pestle. Afraid there is no way around this, it’s literally in the name of the dish. MORTar, MOReTum, that’s not a coincidence.
Get a lot of herbs, the only requirement is that you like them. There is no definitive list.
Pictured: arugula, mint, thyme, oregano, parsley, basil
and some that I’m forgetting.
Not pictured: chives, garlic and salt.
You can put plenty of other green herbs in there. Go wild!
If you want to keep it “Roman” you can still add loads of things. Romans did not have new world plants (no tomatoes or chillies, sorry!) but they still had plenty of variety. Do you like coriander (yuck!)? Chuck it in there, just don’t offer it to me.
One notable thing we are missing is common rue, it’s one of the few herbs that you will find in most moretum recipes and we would have added it if we were able to find it. It’s sadly not that common anymore.
Note that the herbs shown in the above images depict way too many herbs for the amount of ricotta you get from 750ml of whole milk. I would recommend you use a third of this.
You can put the herbs straight into the mortar.
However, I prefer to give them a rough chop to make them more compact and easier to handle.
Now fill half the mortar and start mashing. Not pictured are the two cloves of garlic and the salt that also went in there.
Then, add your cheese in batches and mash it all together. At this point you might also realise that your mortar is slightly too small.
We used a wooden mortar and pestle so our leaves are still a bit intact. With coarse granite ones you can create a more homogenous mixture.
Habemus Moretem! (my latin cases might be a bit off here)
Will keep for three to four days in the fridge. Goes great with bread. Just like the one we made in our video on Roman bread!