Ingredients: 1 gallon whole milk 1/4 cup vinegar

Gently heat your milk to 90-95 degrees Celsius. Do this very slowly in a heavy bottomed pot, or in a water bath inside a larger pot. Your milk should not stick or burn. It should take at least 20- 25 minutes for your milk to achieve the correct temperature if you start using cold milk. Mine sometimes takes 45 minutes.

When your milk is between 90 and 95 degrees (not a smidgen under or over - if you've heated your milk gradually, your window of opportunity here can be as long as five minutes) quickly pour in the vinegar, and give one quick, brief stir - only to aid in the dispersal of the vinegar, but not to stir up the milk too much - or you risk breaking up your gorgeous big ricotta curds into tiny, grainy little ricotta curds. Remove the pot from the source of heat and let it set for about 10 or 15 minutes. Your ricotta curd should have risen nicely to the top, and will be floating there.

Using a finely slotted spoon, gently ladle the curd into a cheesecloth lined sieve, or if you have some, into ricotta molds (Ricotta molds - like mine pictured above - are small plastic basket shaped molds meant to mimic the pattern of the wicker baskets that ricotta used to be drained in). Cheesemaking.com sells some great disposable ones for super cheap. And here`s the best bit about that...you don`t have to dispose of them. You can use them over and over again. Not a bad deal when you consider that the fancy-pants ones like the one pictured above are 12 times the price!

When ladling, try to keep the curd chunks as large as you can, the more they are handles and broken up the tougher they will become, which is exactly what you don`t want. You want cloud-soft moist and creamy ricotta. Not rubbery, grainy grocery store stuff!

Allow your ricotta to drain for at least 30 minutes (or longer if you`re still having a lot of whey run off)

source: http://gorgeoustown.typepad.com/lex_culinaria/2005/05/how_to_ricott_i.html