Can I eat ricotta while pregnant?

The verdict

Ricotta is the clearest example on this site of the same cheese getting three different answers.

In the UK, the NHS names ricotta on its list of pasteurised soft cheeses that are safe to eat in pregnancy. In Australia and New Zealand, FSANZ names ricotta in the higher-risk row of its table for pregnant women, next to brie, camembert, mozzarella, feta and blue. In the United States, ordinary Italian-style ricotta made with pasteurised milk is not restricted, but requeson, the Latin American cheese made by the same method and often sold as ricotta, appears by name on the FDA's queso fresco-type avoid list, which applies whether the cheese was made from pasteurised or unpasteurised milk.

Cooked ricotta is safe under all three. That covers lasagne, cannelloni, stuffed shells, ricotta baked in a tart and ricotta stirred into a hot sauce.

What ricotta is, and why it is usually low risk

Ricotta is not a curd cheese in the usual sense. It is made by reheating whey left over from cheesemaking, hence the name, which means recooked. Acid and heat precipitate the remaining proteins, which are drained to give a soft, grainy, mild cheese.

That process leaves a product with no rind, no surface mould and no ripening period. It is the same reason the NHS separates mozzarella and feta from brie: nothing about ricotta drives the pH back towards neutral or gives listeria weeks of cold storage to work with.

What it does leave is a very wet, low-salt, low-acid cheese with a short shelf life, which is precisely the profile that makes post-production contamination matter. Ricotta is not risky because of what it is made from; it is vulnerable to what happens to it afterwards.

Requeson and the American exception

The FDA's queso fresco-type category covers soft fresh cheeses that do not go through a significant ageing or ripening process, and it names queso fresco, queso blanco and requeson. Requeson is made from whey in essentially the ricotta method and is often labelled ricotta in Latin American groceries.

The FDA's reasoning is that these cheeses are high in moisture and low in acidity, which is a favourable environment for listeria, and that although most are made from pasteurised milk, pasteurised cheeses can be recontaminated afterwards if the manufacturing environment is unsanitary. Its guidance points to repeated listeriosis outbreaks linked to this category, and its recommendation is that people vulnerable to listeriosis avoid all queso fresco-type cheeses.

If you are in the US and buying a tub labelled ricotta from a mainstream dairy brand, that is Italian-style ricotta and not what the FDA is describing. If you are buying requeson, or ricotta from a Hispanic-style cheese producer, the FDA guidance applies.

Cooking it settles everything

Ricotta is one of the easiest restricted-ish cheeses to work around, because most of the dishes people want it for are baked.

The NHS lists any cheese cooked until steaming hot, including soft or blue cheese, as safe. FSANZ specifies baked soft cheeses cooked to an internal temperature of 75C as the safer alternative to its higher-risk cheese row. The FDA's advice for people who continue to eat queso fresco-type cheeses is to cook them as part of a dish, to a minimum internal temperature of 165F, which is 74C.

All three numbers describe the same thing: the middle of the dish, not the surface. Lasagne, cannelloni, baked ziti, stuffed pasta shells, a ricotta cheesecake, ricotta pancakes and ricotta folded into a hot sauce and returned to the heat all clear it. Ricotta spread cold on toast, dolloped on a finished dish, or stirred through a salad does not.

Handling it at home

Because ricotta is wet and mild, the storage advice carries more weight than for a harder cheese. The FSA's listeria guidance is to keep the fridge below 5C, refrigerate food promptly after purchase, always eat or freeze by the use-by date, follow storage instructions for opened food, and where none is given, use opened food within two days.

FSANZ's cheese precaution is to purchase cheese packaged by the manufacturer and store it in the fridge, and its general advice for vulnerable people is that it is safest to eat only freshly prepared food. The FDA advises against keeping leftovers of soft fresh cheeses once the package is opened.

In practice: buy a sealed tub rather than a scoop from a counter, get it home cold, use it within a couple of days of opening, and do not leave the tub out while you assemble a dish.

If you have already eaten some

Cold pasteurised Italian-style ricotta in the UK or Ireland is within guidance, so there is nothing to do.

If you ate it cold in Australia, or ate requeson in the US, the risk remains low. Listeriosis is rare, and the NHS's general position is that a small amount of a food that should have been avoided, if you did not become ill, is unlikely to affect your baby.

The reason it is treated seriously despite being rare is the outcome, not the frequency: listeriosis in pregnancy can cause miscarriage, stillbirth, premature delivery or serious infection in a newborn, and the FDA notes pregnant women are about ten times more likely to get listeriosis than other healthy adults. Watch for fever, chills, muscle aches, headache, stiff neck, confusion, loss of balance or an upset stomach, remembering that ACOG says symptoms can appear as late as two months afterwards, and contact your midwife or GP the same day if they do.

Where guidance genuinely differs

The UK classifies by rind and milk, so pasteurised ricotta is safe. Ireland's HSE avoid list names unpasteurised dairy, mould-ripened cheese and blue cheese, and does not include ricotta.

Australia and New Zealand classify by texture, so ricotta is higher risk and the recommendation is a hard cheese, pasteurised cream cheese, plain cottage cheese, or ricotta baked to 75C.

The US classifies by milk plus one named exception, and requeson falls inside that exception on outbreak history rather than on any difference in the milk. That is a genuinely different kind of reasoning from the other two: the FDA is responding to what has actually made American pregnant women ill, not to a property of the cheese.

Three routes, one convergence: bake it, and the disagreement disappears.