Wednesday, March 18, 2015

Cheese Making!

Making Mozzarella

Since we have a surplus of milk, I took a shot at cheesemaking, using a recipe found here.  After adding citric acid to the cold milk, warming to 90 degrees and stirring in the rennet, below is what it looks like.

Testing the curds - the whey should be clear and the curds stiff enough to peel back like this.  I left it to sit beyond the recommended 5 minutes to get to this point.


Cutting the cheese (nyuck nyuck!)


After heating the curds up to 110 degrees, removing from heat, and stirring for about 5 minutes, you drain the creamy whey off -- it went into pancakes this morning.


After pressing the curds in the colander and nuking it, you knead it and stretch it... at this point, I lost track of the directions (partly because they were on my phone and my hands were messy).  Here's where you'd knead in some salt for flavor (which I forgot).

Soak in cold water, wrap, and you have cheese!

Back to the big pot of yellow whey (which after some later reading I found is handy to keep hot for bathing the cheese in as you stretch it), heat the whey to 200 degrees and let it cool.

The proteins that are left over bind together and float -- ladle them out and drain with a cloth, and you get ricotta cheese.

We ate this in our pancakes this morning also!

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