New Thing #97 - Homemade Mozzarella

February - Learning

February 23, 2019 - Homemade Mozzarella (sorry lactose intolerant friends)

I love cheese. (But, really, who doesn't?) Cheese is freaking delicious. Except for blue cheese. Or gorgonzola. Those cheeses are just the worst. They ruin the flavor of anything they touch. Plus, you know, I'm allergic to mold, which is kinda how they make that cheese. Or is it? I don't really know. I just know it's gross.

But, I digress. Today, I attempted (mostly successfully) to make mozzarella from scratch. Fresh mozzarella is probably my favorite cheese, and nothing beats a caprese salad with fresh mozz. Turns out making mozzarella is really quite simple (pretty much). I assumed there were a billion complicated steps to making the milky white concoction I love so much.

Nope, it only requires about 8 steps and 6 ingredients. I purchased a cheese starter kit from a farm in Tennessee off of Amazon that came with pretty much all the ingredients we'd need (minus the milk, of course). And I opted to make the cheese at my friends Betsy and JP's house since my kitchen is smaller and I wanted to invite them to help.

Simple enough, right?

My cheesy co-pilot....see what I did there?

Betsy had all the equipment we'd need except for a thermometer, so I planned on picking one up from Target on my way home from work last night. Surely, a cooking thermometer would be easy to find, no?

Nope.

While in Target, I ran into an old friend and got sidetracked for about 20 minutes. In my attempt to get out pretty quickly, I grabbed the only thermometer that wasn't digital or a meat thermometer. I knew it'd need to stay in the pot while I heated the milk, and I didn't think the digital ones were safe to submerge into liquid for extended periods of time.

It wasn't until I got home that I really looked at the thermometer and realized that it was a candy and/or frying thermometer. Which you wouldn't think would be any issue because this kind was meant to stay inside a hot liquid. One problem. The gauge started at 100 degrees, and we needed to start the milk cooking process at 85 degrees.

Well shit.

I took it back to Target, but realized there weren't any other kinds there. Even ran to Schnucks on the off chance they had one. Nope. Since my night was a bust, I opted to just try Wal-Mart or Bed Bath & Beyond this morning. Who knew a simple thermometer was going to be the biggest issue to making cheese?!

Winner winner. Found this bad boy at Wal-Mart this morning.

After my thermometer acquisition, off to Betsy's I went. I didn't think to tell her to sterilize all the equipment before I got there, so we had about 45 minutes to wait for the water in her pot to boil, along with all the utensils we'd be needing. (And yes, much like watching paint dry, watching a pot of water come to a boil was about as exciting as it sounds.) According to the instructions, sterilizing the equipment makes sure that we don't contaminate the specific bacterial cultures needed for the cheese-making process.

Sterilization for the win!

Once the pot/utensils were cool, we started our cheese-making extravaganza. Into 1 gallon of whole milk, I added citric acid powder. According to this website, citric acid lowers the pH of the milk to allow for a better stretch of the mozzarella. I added it directly to the gallon jug while we waited for the utensils to finish boiling and cooling. In hindsight, I probably should have waited until the utensils had cooled before doing this process, because it all kind of settled into the bottom while we waited. I think that's one of the reasons we didn't have a good stretch on the mozz...but I'll get to that later.

Seemed like a solid idea at the time!

We heated the milk slowly to 85 degrees (which took for-freaking-ever, by the way), took it off the heat and prepped the next step. First I added calcium chloride to some water, and then added liquid rennet to some more water as well. Once those were prepped, we checked the temp of the milk and reheated slightly until it reached 88 degrees.

Liquid rennet helps remove the whey from the curds, strengthening the protein chain. Or something science-y like that. And because calcium levels are diminished during the pasteurizing process, calcium chloride is added in order to restore those calcium levels to store-bought pasteurized milk.

Future cheesy goodness.

Nailed it!

From here I added the diluted calcium chloride (and stirred), then the diluted rennet. Back to the burner it went to slowly heat up to 104 degrees. We had to stir pretty gently (it even said to do an up and down motion, not a swirling motion, which I didn't realize until I was writing this that it probably meant side to side, not actually up and down out of the pan like we did!!)

Slow and steady.

Stirring like a weirdo.

As I was stirring, I noticed the curds start to form on the top of the surface and separate from the whey (the liquid). Once the 104 degree temp was reached (which again, took awhile), we removed from the heat and let it rest for a few minutes.

Curds and whey! Little Miss Muffet better keep her grubby little hands away from this.

Now came the tedious part of straining the curds from the whey. We had to take multiple passes to drain as much of the whey off as possible before transferring the curds to our bowl, since our strainer wasn't really that big. Thankfully Betsy was there to help, as this worked much better with two people.

This. Took. For. Ever.

Don't mind me, just straining my curds. NBD.

Eventually all the curds were separated and we moved on to the next step: adding some salt on top (being careful not to disturb the curd.....a sentence I never thought I'd type), then microwave on high for a minute.

All the curds!

Next up, draining out any more whey, gently folding the curds once to find any sneaky whey underneath, salting again and microwaving yet again.

Fold...

...Salt...

...Microwave.

Instructions at this point said to repeat the above step until there was no more whey. It took a few additional tries before it was all gone. Then, we were supposed to stretch and shape the cheese and salt to taste. If it was grainy, it suggested to heat again until it looked more like taffy. I think we probably did that 6 or 7 times until it really started looking like cheese. The instructions never said to use our hands, so we opted to use the spatula for this step. I think we probably should have actually stretched it, to better get that taffy-like consistency. It didn't have that stretch that mozz has. Next time!!

It's getting there!

We had a nosy would-be cheese thief trying to figure out what we were doing. :)

Um, it actually looks like cheese!

If I was really to stretch this with my hands, it was pretty damn hot to do so.

Eventually it shaped into a nice ball and it was time to taste!! While it was still slightly grainy (probably could have used a few more turns in the microwave and/or actual stretching), it looked and tasted like mozzarella! Was it the best mozz I've ever eaten? No, but it wasn't bad either. It wasn't as soft and decadent as I like, but we promptly ate nearly the entire ball of it, so I'd say it was still pretty edible! We did cure it in a salt water solution to retain its shape if we refrigerated any of it, but only 1/4 of it lasted, so there wasn't much to refrigerate.

MOZZARELLA!!!

Super awkward photo. We forgot to get a pic before we started eating it, so we tried to cover up the 1/3 of the ball that was gone. What resulted is us cradling this like we just unearthed a rare dinosaur egg.

All that remained after Betsy, JP and I attacked it.

Once we finished with the mozzarella, I wanted to use the leftover whey in some way. It seemed like a waste to throw out all that liquid. A few websites said you can make ricotta from the leftover whey, so we gave it a shot. We heated it back up until whatever remaining curds separated from the whey. Then we strained it through the provided cheesecloth and let it hang for an hour or so to get out all the liquid.

Reheating the whey.

Hitting 200.

Straining.

And draining.

Clipped this to the cabinet handle. Worked great until about the last 10 minutes when the bag of cheese fell and landed BACK in the whey. :(

Ricotta!!

So the recipe I found online didn't say anything about adding salt at any stage of the ricotta process. And we could totally tell. The ricotta was not good. As in not at all. As in, I'm not even sure that should be categorized as actual cheese. It didn't taste like cheese and the consistency was too dry. We pretty much immediately threw it away. There is another ricotta recipe in the kit I bought, so I think we'll try it that way next time. But, next time I have left over whey, I can use it to cook pasta, add to smoothies for protein, add to my hair (okay, probably not) or drink it straight (gross), along with any dozen other ideas.

While it was a longer process than I anticipated, it was incredibly simple and a lot of fun. I'd definitely do it again. I mean, I have enough materials to mix with 19 more gallons of milk, so if anyone wants some mozz, let me know!

We will likely try some of the other cheeses in the kit as well: whole milk ricotta, mascarpone, queso blanco, goat cheese, cream cheese and even butter. These all required extended curing/wait times, so they weren't ideal for today's shenanigans, but I will likely try at least a few of these at some point. Like I said, I can make about 19 more pounds of cheese.