Italian Soft Sheep's Milk Ricotta and Orange Cake | Torta Morbida di Ricotta di Pecora e Arancia
Updated: Sep 15
Sheep's milk ricotta is a different ingredient from the cow's milk tubs sold in supermarkets, and this cake is built to show exactly why. It carries close to twice the fat, it holds its moisture instead of weeping it, and it keeps a faint grassy sharpness that survives the oven intact. Put orange zest and fresh orange juice against that sharpness and you get a cake that tastes of dairy and citrus in equal measure, with no cream, no syrup and very little butter doing any of the work.
The method is deliberately plain. There is no creaming of butter and sugar, no whipping of whites, no folding of meringue. Everything goes into one bowl in sequence, the flour is folded in at the last moment, and the cake bakes in a single round tin until the top cracks lightly and the centre is still faintly soft. The result is golden outside, very tender inside, and almost creamy in the middle once it has rested overnight.
Yield: 10 slices from a 9 inch (23 cm) cake. Prep: 25 minutes. Drain: 1 hour. Bake: 45 to 55 minutes. Rest: overnight. Difficulty: easy. Course: dolce. Region: Sardinia and the southern shepherding regions.
The Story
Ricotta di pecora comes from the whey left behind when pecorino is made. The whey is reheated until the remaining proteins rise to the surface, and those curds are skimmed off and drained: ricotta means recooked, and the name describes the process precisely. It is a byproduct of cheesemaking rather than a cheese, and it belongs wherever sheep were kept in numbers, which in Italy means Sardinia above all, then Sicily, Lazio, Abruzzo and Basilicata. In those regions cows were rare until well into the twentieth century, and ricotta on the table meant sheep.
The seasons of the two ingredients line up almost perfectly. Ewes lamb in late winter, milk production peaks through spring, and the ricotta made in February and March is the sweetest and richest of the year. That is exactly when the citrus groves of the south are at their heaviest, when oranges are picked for the table rather than for juice, and when a household would have both things in the kitchen at once. The pairing was not invented by a pastry chef; it was dictated by the calendar.
Ingredients
For the cake
Sheep's milk ricotta, well drained, 15 oz (425 g)
All purpose flour, 1 1/2 cups (190 g)
Granulated sugar, 3/4 cup (150 g)
Large eggs, at room temperature, 3
Unsalted butter, melted and cooled, 1/3 cup (75 g)
Freshly squeezed orange juice, 1/3 cup (80 ml)
Finely grated zest of untreated oranges, from 2
Pure vanilla extract, 1 tsp (5 ml)
Baking powder, 2 tsp (8 g)
Fine sea salt, 1/4 tsp (1.5 g)
For finishing
Powdered sugar, for dusting, about 2 tbsp (15 g)
Butter and parchment paper, for the tin
Candied orange peel, optional, 1 oz (30 g)
Preparation
Draining the ricotta
Tip the ricotta into a fine mesh sieve set over a bowl and leave it for an hour at cool room temperature. Sheep's milk ricotta is normally firm enough to need very little, but any tub that has been standing on a shelf will have thrown whey, and that liquid goes straight into the crumb and weighs it down. Do not press or squeeze it: the moisture that stays inside the curd is what keeps this cake soft for three days without any syrup.
Scenting the sugar with orange
Grate the zest of both oranges straight into the sugar, taking only the coloured layer and none of the white pith beneath it. Rub the zest through the sugar with your fingertips for a full half minute, until the sugar is visibly damp and the bowl smells strongly of orange. The sugar crystals tear open the oil cells in the zest, and this single step roughly doubles the citrus presence in the finished cake. Zest grated onto a board and scraped in later leaves most of its oil behind on the wood.
Loosening the ricotta
Beat the drained ricotta on its own with a whisk or a wooden spoon for about a minute, until it slackens and turns creamy. Sheep's milk ricotta starts dense and grainy, and anything added before it has been broken down will lock the lumps in place: they stay as small pale knots right through the batter and into the baked cake. Work it against the side of the bowl rather than stirring in circles, and stop when it looks like a thick, smooth cream.
Building the batter
Whisk the orange sugar into the ricotta, then add the eggs one at a time, waiting until each has been fully absorbed before the next goes in. Follow with the vanilla, the orange juice and finally the melted butter, which must be barely warm rather than hot. The mixture should end up smooth, pale and pourable, roughly the consistency of a thick pancake batter. If it looks split, the butter was too warm or the eggs too cold, and twenty seconds of firm whisking will bring it back together.
Folding in the flour
Sift the flour with the baking powder and the salt so the leavener is spread evenly through a batter you are not going to beat. Add it to the wet mixture in two additions, folding with a spatula and cutting down through the centre rather than stirring around the bowl. Stop as soon as the last streak of flour disappears, plus two strokes to be certain and no more. This cake has no structural ambitions and the one way to ruin it now is to develop gluten in a batter this wet.
Baking the cake
Butter a 9 inch (23 cm) springform tin, line the base with parchment, pour the batter in and level the top gently with the back of a spoon. Bake at 340°F (170°C) on the middle shelf for 45 to 55 minutes and do not open the door for the first thirty. The cake is ready when the top is deep even gold, the surface has cracked lightly toward the centre, the sides have pulled a millimetre or two from the tin, and a skewer pushed in halfway between edge and centre comes out clean while one pushed into the very middle still shows a trace of moist crumb.
Cooling, releasing and dusting
Leave the cake in its tin on a rack for 20 minutes before you touch the clip, because the crumb is extremely tender while hot and it tears if the ring is pulled away early. Run a thin knife around the edge, release the clip, and let the cake finish cooling on the springform base. Dust the top generously with powdered sugar through a fine sieve at the last possible moment before serving: powdered sugar draws moisture out of the crust and goes grey and patchy within the hour.
Plating
Cut generous wedges with a serrated knife and a light sawing motion. A straight downward press compresses this crumb instead of cutting it, and the slice arrives on the plate squashed on one side. Cut a little wider than you would for a butter cake, because the texture is lighter than it looks and a thin slice falls apart on the server.
Serve at room temperature on plain plates. Chilled, the cake tastes closed and the orange retreats behind the dairy, so take it out of the refrigerator at least twenty minutes ahead if it has been stored there. With coffee it needs nothing alongside, which is how it is eaten in the south, mid morning or in the late afternoon.
Professional Technique
The technical heart of this cake is that it is an emulsion rather than an aerated batter. Nothing here is whipped: the lift comes entirely from baking powder reacting against the acidity of the orange juice and the ricotta, and the structure comes from egg protein and the fat suspended in the cheese. That is why the order of assembly matters so much. The ricotta is loosened first so it can accept liquid, the sugar goes in second because it dissolves into the whey and stabilises the mixture, the eggs follow one at a time so each is emulsified before the next arrives, and the melted butter comes last because it is the element most likely to break the suspension if it meets anything cold.
The second technique is the maceration of zest in sugar, which pastry kitchens call sablage aux zestes. Citrus oil sits in fragile cells just under the coloured skin and evaporates quickly once released. Rubbing the zest into sugar ruptures those cells and immediately traps the oil in a crystalline carrier that holds it until the batter is wet, which means far more of it survives to the finished cake than if the zest were simply stirred in. The same trick works with lemon and bergamot, and it costs thirty seconds.
Texture and Moisture Control
The whole balance of this cake rests on how much water is in the ricotta when it goes into the bowl. Too wet and you get a dense, damp seam running through the middle and a sunken centre; too dry, because somebody squeezed it in a cloth, and the crumb turns short and crumbly by the second day. Drain anything that pools whey in its container, leave it alone once it has stopped dripping, and judge it by feel: it should hold the mark of a spoon without weeping.
The third of a cup of orange juice looks like a great deal of liquid against this quantity of flour, and it is deliberate. It lightens the crumb, it carries aroma that zest alone cannot supply, and its acidity is what the baking powder reacts against. Do not increase it in search of more orange flavour, because the centre will then never set. More zest is the correct way to intensify the citrus; more juice is not.
Professional Mise en Place
This is a one bowl cake with a short window between wetting the baking powder and getting the tin into the oven, so everything is measured and prepared before any mixing starts.
Equipment and tools
Springform tin, 9 inch (23 cm), buttered and lined with parchment
Fine mesh sieve for draining the ricotta and a second one for dusting
Microplane or fine grater for the zest
Balloon whisk, flexible spatula, digital scale
Cooling rack and a thin bladed knife for releasing the ring
Prepared ahead
Ricotta drained for 1 hour and brought to room temperature
Eggs out of the refrigerator a full hour before mixing
Butter melted early so it cools to barely warm while you work
Oranges zested into the sugar first, then juiced
Flour weighed rather than scooped, sifted with baking powder and salt
Service setup
Oven preheated a full twenty minutes so the cake lifts from the first minute
Cake baked the day before service and held at cool room temperature
Powdered sugar and a fine sieve held back until the moment of serving
Serrated knife and a wide spatula ready, blade wiped between cuts
Slices brought to room temperature for twenty minutes if they were refrigerated
Chef Tips
Buy the ricotta from a cheese counter on the day you bake if you possibly can. Sheep's milk ricotta is at its best within forty eight hours of being made and turns faintly sour after four or five days, and that sourness is not subtle once it has been through the oven.
Use untreated oranges. The zest supplies a third of the flavour here, and wax, fungicide and the bitterness of over enthusiastic grating all carry straight into the crumb. Grate lightly and stop the moment you see white underneath the blade.
Weigh the flour instead of scooping it. A firmly packed cup and a half can run a good ounce over 190 g, and that difference alone is the gap between a soft cake and a dry one. If you have no scale, spoon the flour into the cup and level it with a knife.
Bake it the day before you want it. This cake genuinely improves overnight as the ricotta sets and the moisture redistributes, and a tablespoon of Vin Santo or orange liqueur added with the juice deepens the citrus noticeably if you want a version for the end of a long lunch.
Common Mistakes
Using wet, undrained ricotta. The excess whey has nowhere to go and settles into a damp seam through the middle of the cake, often with a sunken top above it. An hour in a sieve solves it completely, and the drained liquid is worth nothing.
Overmixing once the flour is in. A wet batter develops gluten faster than a stiff one, and thirty seconds of enthusiastic beating turns a tender crumb rubbery. Fold, count the strokes, and stop at the last streak of flour.
Opening the oven door early. The temperature drops sharply, the rising batter collapses while its structure is still forming, and the centre never recovers. Leave it shut for the first thirty minutes whatever the smell suggests.
Baking until the centre skewer is clean. That overshoots the creamy heart the cake is built around and dries the outer inch. Test halfway between edge and centre instead, and accept a trace of moist crumb in the very middle.
Unmoulding while hot. The crumb has very little structure at that point and the sides tear away with the ring. Twenty minutes in the tin on a rack costs nothing and saves the cake.
Wine Pairing
Moscato d'Asti DOCG: Low in alcohol, gently sparkling and openly grapey, it meets the orange zest on its own aromatic ground rather than competing with it. The light effervescence lifts the fat of the sheep's milk ricotta off the palate between mouthfuls, and its sweetness sits just above the cake, which is far less sweet than most desserts served with it.
Malvasia di Bosa DOC: The Sardinian bottle for a Sardinian cake, aged under a film of yeast until it develops bruised apple, almond and dried nut notes. That oxidative depth answers the faint grassy sharpness of ewe's milk instead of trying to cover it, and the dry version in particular keeps the pairing from tipping into sugar on sugar.
Girò di Cagliari DOC: A sweet red from the Campidano plain, soft in tannin and carrying dried fig and candied peel. It works here because the cake has enough dairy fat to absorb a red wine without clashing, and because the candied citrus character in the glass runs directly alongside the orange in the crumb. Serve it lightly chilled.
Ramandolo DOCG: From Friuli, made from Verduzzo left to dry, with apricot and honey over a distinctly tannic grip unusual in a sweet white. That grip is the point: it scrubs the palate clean of the ricotta fat in a way a softer dessert wine cannot, and the honeyed fruit picks up the caramelised edge of the baked crust.
Storage & Reheating
Kept under a cake dome or loosely wrapped at cool room temperature, the torta holds beautifully for three days and is at its best on the second. Do not seal it in plastic while it is still even faintly warm, because the trapped steam softens the crust and turns the top sticky. Refrigeration is unnecessary in a cool kitchen and it firms the crumb noticeably.
In a warm kitchen, or past the third day, move it to a sealed container in the refrigerator where it will keep for five days. Bring each slice back to room temperature for twenty minutes before serving, or give it eight seconds in a microwave at low power, which restores the creamy texture without drying the edges. Do not reheat it in an oven: the crumb loses moisture far faster than it regains softness.
Nutrition
Per serving, based on 10 slices:
Calories: 285 kcal
Total Fat: 13 g
Saturated Fat: 7 g
Trans Fat: 0 g
Unsaturated Fat: 5 g
Cholesterol: 88 mg
Sodium: 180 mg
Total Carbohydrates: 32 g
Fiber: 0.8 g
Total Sugars: 17 g
Added Sugars: 15 g
Protein: 9.5 g
Lactose: 2.2 g
Principal micronutrients: calcium, phosphorus, vitamin B12, riboflavin, vitamin A, vitamin C
These figures are estimates and vary with the fat content of the ricotta you buy. The protein is unusually high for a cake and comes almost entirely from the ricotta and the eggs, and a single slice supplies roughly a fifth of a daily calcium requirement.
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