Making Cheese

Did you know that you can stretch Mozzarella like taffy?

I am reading (or rather listening to) the book Animal Vegetable Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. She normally writes fiction with an environmental or sciencey twist. This book is more about food and about eating locally. In it, she mentions making cheese. I love cheese. When she said that making mozarella takes less than an hour, I was enthralled.

So, I ordered a kit from the Cheese Queen. It arrived on Wednesday and I had to make some
cheese! I noticed that Richard had bought a fresh gallon of milk so I grabbed it and started making cheese! Well, since I hadn't read all the directions yet, it came out horrible. Upon further inspection I discovered that the milk was homogenized. Homogenized milk cannot be used to make cheese! It won't set a curd. Well, I do believe in inquiry based learning so what can I say?

Last night, I went to three different stores before I could find a brand of milk in the store that is not homogenized. Sigh.

Want to see how easy it is to make cheese once you have found the right milk?

First, warm up your wood cook stove. What?! You don't have one of these? Oh, well, then you'll have to use your gas or electric stove!

In a stainless steel pot heat your non-homogenized milk with a teaspoon of citric acid mixed with 1/4 cup water to 90 degrees F while stirring slowly. Once you reach 90, remove from heat and gently stir in 1/4 tablet of rennet (previously dissolved in 1 cup water). Stir less than 1 minute and then let set covered for 5 minutes.

You are looking for this, a clean break. See how the curd breaks away from the whey?

If you don't have a clean break, let it set for a few more minutes undisturbed. Once you have the break, you can cut the curd into 1/4 inch pieces.

Put it back on the heat and gently stir. You don't want to break the curd up much smaller than it is, you just don't want anything to burn while you warm up the curds and cook them a little.

Here are the curds on the stove. This time we heat them to 105 while gently stirring. We don't want to break the curds! Once you reach 105, take the pot off the heat and stir gently for 2-5 minutes. The longer you stir the harder the cheese.

Separate the curds from the whey. Put the curds in a glass container. You want to get as much whey out of the curds as possible.

Heat the curds in the microwave for 1 minute. Pour off the whey and gently fold the curds into each other. Heat the curds for another 30 seconds and pour off the whey and fold. This is where you add your cheese salt and any herbs. The curds will form a "dough". The reason we heat the curds is because they need to be at about 140 F to stretch.