| ESTIMATED CALORIC INFO | |
|---|---|
| Serving Size | One slice |
| Calories from Protein | 35% |
| Calories from Fat | 65% |
| Calories from Carbs | 0% |
| Total Calories | 50 |
You can make the best mozzarella cheese in your kitchen in one hour with 4 ingredients. It actually took me more like two hours, but that’s because I completely screwed up THE VERY FIRST STEP of the damn process.
It’s actually really easy if you follow instructions (unlike me). There are two ingredients that you’ll probably have to obtain over the web, but other than that you just need whole milk, salt, and a thermometer. Those two ingredients are rennet and citric acid, and adding those ingredients to your milk causes the curd to separate from the whey.
You will need…
- 1 gallon whole milk
- Citric acid
- 1 tablet vegetable rennet
- Salt
- Candy/cheese thermometer
- Rubber gloves
You can buy the items individually pretty cheap, or you can go to the Cheese Queen and buy a starter kit – you’ll get everything you need there for a good price (except the gloves and milk).
First, mix 1 tbsp citric acid in 1 cup of cool water and set aside to dissolve. Mix 1 rennet tablet in 1/4 cup of cool water and dissolve. After the citric acid has dissolved, pour 1 gallon of whole milk into a large stock pot at the same time as the acid mixture. Stir thoroughly for 30 seconds, and set the burner on medium-high heat. Okay… time out. This was where I screwed up. Yes – this early in the game. I didn’t mix the citric acid with the milk when I put it in the stock pot and wound up trying to throw it in later. Worst part was I didn’t even realize it until I was at the final steps of the process. One superfast trip to the store and back and take two was much more successful. Now let us never speak of this again.
A word here about milk. Make sure you get good milk for this, because your final product will be a reflection of it. You want to use whole milk, and you really want to use local, hormone free, grass-fed milk too (even if you don’t know it yet). I get my milk products from a creamery in the Shenandoah Valley – it’s really tasty and readily available, you can get it from Whole Foods. Whatever you do, make sure you do not use ultra-pasteurized milk, as it won’t work. Ultra-pasteurization is a process that uses an extreme and immediate heating process (through steam) to raise the milk temperature to 280 degrees or higher for at least two seconds so it can better travel halfway around the world to reach grocery store shelves. Unfortunately, this flattens the protein molecules (which are normally three dimensional), preventing the enzymes from being able to attach and break them down. Regular pasteurization is a process requiring slow heating, and it’s the more common process you’ll see on any milk you get that hasn’t come across the country to reach you. It’s probably not a bad idea to stay away from ultra-pasteurization in general, but it’s paramount in cheesemaking endeavors, as the flash heating from ultra-pasteurization will prevent your curd and whey from separating properly. There are also some questions as to the safety of the aseptic tetra-brik containers leeching endocrines into your milk, but I think this concern is pretty minimal. Still, always better to err on the safe side.
The best part about Shenandoah Valley Creamery? It’s cheap! It comes in glass bottles and Whole Foods refunds $2 for every bottle returned. A quart of milk runs about 99 cents after return.
Once your milk and citric acid is in the stock pot, bring the temperature up to 90 degrees – use your thermometer to be precise about it and keep the milk moving. Once it hits 90, stir the rennet mixture into the pot for at least 30 seconds, and move it off the heat and cover for 5-7 minutes. The curd will start to harden and become substantial.
Using a long knife, slice through the curd in a criss-crossed pattern all the way to the bottom of the pot. As the whey separates, it should look a bit like this:
Move the pot back onto the heat and bring the curd up to 105 degrees. Keep the curd moving around the pot with a gentle stir. You want to try to preserve the shapes.
After it gets to 105, take it off the heat and let it sit, covered, for another 5-7 minutes. Longer will make for a firmer curd. Next, drain as much of the whey out of the pot as you can while at the same time trying not to lose any curd. If I haven’t been clear, the whey is the clear translucent liquid and the curd is the hardened white substance. This is the difficult part of the process – you can try straining with a cheesecloth, or holding the curd back while pouring the whey out of a pot. I had to recruit my wife to hold a pot lid over the stock pot while I poured the whey out into the sink, stopping and spinning the pot around every few seconds. Truth be told, a bit awkward. And difficult. But we made it happen.
There are two methods to finish from here out, which both consist of heating the curd a few times over. It can be done in a microwave or heated in a water bath. I went with the microwave.
Once you’ve gotten as much whey out as you can, add 1 tbsp of salt and mix it up. Use the best salt you can – sea salt is good, or my personal favorite Himalayan pink (more on salt in a future post, I promise). Then put it in a microwave safe bowl and microwave it for 30 seconds. Put on your rubber gloves – the curd will be hot now and you don’t want to handle it with your bare hands. Then repeat the whey draining process. Then microwave again. Drain. Heat one more time again if necessary. By the 2nd or 3rd time through the microwave, you should be at a point where you have gotten rid of enough whey that the cheese will form correctly. If you get the curd warm enough (up around 135 degrees), it will start to become stretchy when you pull it apart. This never happened for me but it still turned out great anyway. When you get towards the end of the whey, get your hands good and messy (that’s what the gloves are for, anyway), and play with the curd to press out more of the whey – you pretty much want as much as possible to get out of it, but when it comes to the right consistency you’ll know. Stretch it out, ball it up, squeeze it, repeat. I would imagine this process would be fairly effective as an anger management exercise.
Whey?
NO WHEY!
Once you’ve gotten all good and messy, and squeezed a good bit of the whey out of the curd to the point where you are satisfied, plunge the mozzarella into a bowl of ice water. Make sure you’ve sliced off some warm cheese to taste, first. It’s the best. The ice bowl is necessary for it to retain a good shape. I wound up with about 3 fist-sized balls of cheese. The amount may vary based on how well your draining process goes.
Leave it in the ice ten minutes or so, and you’re done! Success! That wasn’t so bad, was it?
The mozzarella will last in the fridge for a week to 10 days, or for months if you freeze it. However, if you freeze it it will be a different texture when thawed.. so, not as good for eating raw, but better grated, baked, etc.
We made a caprése salad snack with the fresh mozzarella and it was just ridiculously good – I would not even question the effort considering the result we got. Recipe for the caprése will be my next post. Cost was very minimal. Try it!
Costs…
Milk – $3.50
Rubber gloves – $2.00
Rennet and citric acid – >$1.00 per batch ($24.95 for a kit of 30 from the Cheese Queen)
Total cost – $6.50
Time – about 1 hour
The yield was roughly the equivalent of $15-$20 worth of market price fresh mozzarella.
