Ricotta Pizza | Delicious Dollops

Blend ricotta with items in your kitchen to create eye-catching pizzas

Ricotta is climbing the ranks of hot pizza toppings, according to Pizza Today’s “2026 Pizzeria Industry Trends Report.” Since ricotta is not aged, the fresh, white cheese is milder than other varieties, making it the perfect palate to highlight colors, flavors and textures.

When it comes to flavored ricotta blends, no one pushes the envelope like Leah Scurto – the founder, managing partner and pizzaiola at PizzaLeah in Sonoma County, California. Scurto says she started experimenting with infused ricotta around 10 years ago, initially whipping lemon zest and lemon juice into the cheese traditionally made from buffalo, cow, goat or sheep whey left over from the production of other cheeses.

As Scurto began competing against other pizzamakers at events such as the International Pizza Challenge at Pizza Expo, she flexed her creative muscle by adding pesto and confit garlic (both pictured on pizza on Page 36), Calabrian chilis and other peppers to ricotta. “You can flavor ricotta almost any way you want,” Scurto tells Pizza Today. “Ricotta is one of those cheeses that is pretty forgiving. … You can pipe it, you can dollop it, you can put it in a squeeze bottle. There’s all sorts of fun things you can do with ricotta – it’s a really versatile cheese.”

Forgiving though it might be, Scurto says ricotta does best when certain best practices are adhered to concerning serving temperatures, kitchen tools and consistency of inputs.

Blend With Ricotta

When considering what to pair with ricotta, Scurto thinks about flavor as well as color. Pesto ricotta, for example, is more flavorful than ricotta mixed with fresh basil leaves, since pesto contains garlic, olive oil and (in some cases) pine nuts. Red peppers, meanwhile, lend a dark pink or red hue to the creamy cheese blend, which can quickly elevate a pizza’s appearance from food to edible art.

To incorporate the peppers into ricotta, Scurto pulverizes them in a food processor. Since bell peppers have high water content, she adds heavy cream before combining the mixture with fresh ricotta. The addition of heavy cream helps to thicken the red pepper blend, which keeps the flavored ricotta from becoming runny.

Kitchen Gadgets

Depending on what Scurto plans to mix into her ricotta, it might be appropriate to chop, liquefy or purée certain ingredients. For the most part, she says, any food processor is up to the challenge. Sometimes she’ll use a blender or hand mixer to more closely match the texture of additions to the texture of ricotta, saying this creates better incorporation.

“You need to liquefy or cream whatever you’re going to add into your ricotta to keep it smooth,” Scurto says. “By all means, if you want a textured ricotta, go for it! But when I make them, I like to smooth whatever I’m folding into the ricotta, so the textures incorporate better.”

How Much to Use

Scurto aims for teaspoon-size dollops of infused ricotta – about the size of a quarter. PizzaLeah offers 12- and 16-inch round pies as well as a limited number of square pies daily. One square pizza on the menu, the FG Special (named after pizza maker Frank Giovanni), features pepperoni, hot honey and ricotta applied with a piping tip to add texture and dimension.

Aside from the occasional menu mainstay, such as the FG Special, Scurto typically saves ricotta for limited-time-only items, saying “It’s a lot of prep. I go through a ton of ricotta. Most common is a lemon zest or a lemon ricotta,” she says. “But for specials, anything goes, always.”

While some pizzas are topped with ricotta pre-bake using a squeeze bottle, others get the ricotta treatment post-bake – especially if the mixture is likely to melt and pool in the oven.

Make and Serve Confit Garlic Ricotta

To create her famous Confit Garlic Ricotta (see recipe), Scurto selects an olive oil with a high smoke point. “Confit is traditionally cooked in its own fat, but garlic doesn’t have its own fat,” she explains. Instead, she submerges garlic cloves in the olive oil, bakes them and lets them cool submerged in the oil for one hour.

 

“If you strain the oil and smash these garlic cloves down, they turn into a very smooth paste. If you need to thin it out, you can add a little bit of that garlic oil back in,” Scurto says. “Once you have that super thin paste, you can fold it straight into your ricotta with a spatula and mix it together.”

Unlike raw garlic, which can be sharp and bitter, roasted garlic adds a sweet flavor to ricotta’s relatively blank canvas, the pizzaiola says. The cloves aren’t cooked to the point of caramelization, so the blend is a uniform tan color without burnt flecks mixed in.

If the confit garlic is warm when added to ricotta, it will need to set up in the refrigerator for “at least a couple of hours,” Scurto says. But even room-temperature garlic confit should be refrigerated once mixed with ricotta. “I always keep the ricotta cold, and what I do is pipe it on – that’s my move. That’s the way I like to use it best.”

KATE LAVIN is Senior Editor at Pizza Today.

 

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