The curd ready to be kneeded.
A few weekends ago, the youngest daughter and I set out to make some cheese. Our first go at it was mozzarella. I also think we did a pretty good job. I can’t say that it was bursting with flavor, but then again mozzarella isn’t exactly known as a cheese that takes a bite out of your tongue. I’m looking forward to making more in the future, but I need to build a smoker first. I think smoked mozzarella sounds very tasty.
The hardest step in home cheese making is obtaining a source of milk. I don’t have goats or cows, yet. We all really want to get a couple goats, but we aren’t quite prepared to give up going on vacations. We really need some friends that live nearby to get some animals that we can trade off animal care duty with. There is a co-op very near here where I can buy a share of a cow relatively inexpensively, but it is a lot more milk than we could use in a reasonable amount of time. I’d need to make cheese and butter nearly every weekend to use it all. One solution is purchasing milk from the store. This is the route I am going to take until I master the craft. One hidden downside to this is that more and more dairies are no longer just pasteurizing milk. They are now ultra-pasteurizing it. When milk is ultra-pasteurized, the proteins that make time travel cheese making possible are broken down and a good curd will not form after addition of the rennet.
The youngest daughter kneeding the cheese.
To make the cheese you need milk, rennet, an acid, and some salt. That is it for mozzarella. Basically you heat it up, press/kneed out the moisture, and then stretch it like taffy. That’s it. There are some important temperatures and timings, but you can google those for now. I’m not going to go into all the details of making the cheese this time. There are a lot of good resources out there that will teach you what you need to know. I want to get a few more tries under my belt first. This time I was concentrating on how to pull it off.
Stretching the Cheese
One other interesting tidbit on making cheese is that it can be made from dried milk. Most of the recipes call for the addition of cream to the dry milk, but I have seen a few that don’t. I am excited to start experimenting with this. I also wonder if you could add melted butter back into the dried milk instead of cream. Another idea for another day.
