Fresh Mozzarella – The Impatient Cheesemaker’s Best Friend

I broke out my cheese making supplies today. I made a nice fresh mozzarella, which is SUPER simple to make.  You start with a gallon of  pasteurized whole milk (unpasteurized if you have a cow). Be sure not to get ultra-pasteurized milk because it will be the worlds most boring cheese.

Heat this in a pan to 85 degrees, add 1 1/2 tsp of citric acid dissolved in water. Heat to 100 degrees, add 1/8 tsp lipase powder, and 3/4 of a tablet of vegetable rennet (both dissolved in 1/4 cup water each). Heat to 105 degrees.. cover and let sit undisturbed for about 10 minutes. What you get should look something like this:

It looks like cottage cheese almost, but the liquid should look yellow. You’ll want to spoon out the curds and drain them. Once drained, you put it in a bowl and microwave it for 1 minute. You’ll need to dump a little more liquid out of the bowl but it will look much more like cheese at this point. You’d probably want to salt it at this point.. Be sure to taste it. That ‘add a pinch of salt’ bullshit will not suffice.

Then you just don some rubber gloves, and shape it into a ball.

You’ll probably want to soak it in an ice water bath for about 15 minutes so the cheese firms up but essentially you just made some mozzarella. Now that I’ve explained it, it seems a lot less impressive, right?

 

After sampling the cheese, I declared that fresh mozzarella is the Rolls Royce of home made cheese but I’ve been told that we’ve not made enough home made cheese to know for sure. I have several rebuttals.

1. Is this the ‘royal’ we? Because I’m positive one of us made cheese, and the other played Skyrim in his pajamas.
2. It’s my blog, so I will make outrageous and unfounded claims if I wanna.
3. You don’t need to drive my Civic to know a Rolls Royce is better.

So, like I said, it’s the Rolls Royce of Homemade Cheese.

Advertisement