Making Mozzarella

In 2010 I first attempted to make my own cheese by starting with a simple milk + vinegar recipe to create a ricotta style cheese (Make Your Own Cheese Dec 2010).  When I was looking into how to do this I ran across tips and recipes for making all kinds of cheese but the vast majority of them required having rennet as an ingredient so I never pursued it further until this year when I decided one of my resolutions would be to try really new food things each month.  So for my first time I took the easy way out and found a company that provides simple cheese making kits: New England Cheese Making Supply Company.  I selected the extremely friendly 30 Minute Mozzarella and Ricotta Kit.

The kit comes with a dairy thermometer, re-usable butter muslin, citric acid (powder form), vegetable rennet (tablets), cheese salt (looks like sea salt) and a recipe/instruction booklet.  First it should be noted that a dairy thermometer has a smaller and lower temperature range than a candy thermometer making it more accurate and easier to read in the range of concern for cheese making.  Another difference is that some dairy thermometers float which I assume would be convenient if you are leaving it in the pan?  Another significant note about the kit is that it has enough ingredients to make 40 - 1 lb batches of cheese! 

The instructions for the kit are very well written and provide a lot of what went wrong scenarios.  Of keen importance is the type of milk you use.  You do not want to use ultra pasteurized (UP) milk which is what the majority of milk is at the common grocery store.  You need to find a local source of milk which at most has only undergone lower temperature pasteurization.  Essentially the higher the temperature and the longer milk is pasteurized the more the enzymes break down and you need those enzymes to make cheese.  The good news is that their website provides sources for milk that has worked in the recipes and I was able to confirm that a local dairy (that supplies my local grocery store) did have the correct kind of milk.  In fact I highly recommend consulting their website for more details and photos of the steps in the process of making mozzarella 30 Minute Mozzarella (look under the specification tab for photos of the steps).

I used Maple View Farm's Milk from Hillsborough.
 

Overall the process was really easy but some of it was extremely messy.  I discovered that the dipping the curds into hot water (one of the two methods for heating in order to stretch the cheese) was a bit too hot for my hands.  You really have to get the curds hot to be able to stretch them so next time I will be attempting the microwave method versus dripping hot water all over my kitchen counters while making somewhat frantic yelping noises.

After cutting the curd - it should have firmed up a bit more I think.

And I suspect I either didn't heat the milk hot enough, needed more rennet or needed to stretch the cheese a lot longer because although really tasty, my mozzarella turned out softer than I would preferred.  But with enough stuff to attempt this 39 more times I assume I will have a chance to perfect my technique!




The cheese was tasty but a bit soft.