What Noisy Cats Are We

Yesterday afternoon, I finally got around to getting the stuff together to make mozzarella.  I have been researching on the Internet, and had made a very basic cheese a few weeks ago.  Now I was ready to tackle fresh mozzarella.  We buy it a couple times a week for food, so I figured why not try.  It looked pretty easy.

After work yesterday, I drove over to the Modern Homebrew Emporium, which is just up Mass. Ave. from Porters Square.  They sold me the basic mozzarella cheesemaking kit from New England Cheesemaking Supply Company.  The kit cost about $25, and it had all the supplies to make 30 batches of cheese.  In hindsight, I should have just purchased the rennet and citrix acid, and spent less than half of what I did.  I have all the other supplies.  I drove home, and was so excited that I tore open the kit probably before I had set my keys down.  Gwen and I started making the cheese immediately.

You can find the steps to do this in many places on the Internet.  Additionally, the kit came with the basic instructions.  Here’s a link to someone else’s instructions that show basically what I did: http://www.instructables.com/id/Great-Mozzarella-Cheese/.

Basically it involves:
- heat up a gallon of whole milk in a thick bottomed pot until it hits 90 degrees
- stir the whole time while heating
- take it off the heat
- add the Citric Acid, which has been dissolved in 1/4 cup of non tap water (chlorine in tap water is bad for it)
- let sit for five minutes until a ‘clean break’ forms
- cut the clean break with a knife, then put it back on the heat
- heat to 105 degrees (Fahrenheit) while still stirring
- remove from heat again, let sit for 5 minutes
- strain out the whey
- heat in microwave for 1 minute
- add salt
- strain out the whey again
- heat in microwave for 30sec, or until it reaches 135 degrees
- stretch out the cheese until it’s stringy and shiny
- chill in ice water

That is more or less how easy it is.  Again, instructions can be found in many places, and there are many ways to do this.

The one thing I messed up was storage.  We stored it in water and the water sorta killed the cheese in the fridge overnight.  I think we were supposed to use some sort of brine solution.  I’ll work on this.  The first batch last night (before the storage step) came out GREAT!  Tasted exactly like the fresh mozzarella that you would buy in the store.  I was very proud of us.  The subequent ones that we stored overnight did not fare well due to the above mentioned mistakes.  I’ll work on this.

We have all the supplies (save for the milk – need more of that an would love to get my hands on some buffalo milk), so we will try again and keep working on the recipe and process until we find one that works perfect for us.  It felt good to succeed at something that I thought would be damn near impossible.

The picture doesn’t do it justice, and we will post some how-to pics later on, but THIS is what good fresh mozarella looks like.  Tasted great, too!